The theme of
adulteryAdultery is referred to as extramarital sex, philandery, or infidelity, but does not include fornication. The term "adultery" for many people carries a moral or religious association, while the term "extramarital sex" is morally or judgmentally neutral....
has been used in a wide range of
literatureLiterature is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means "acquaintance with letters" , and therefore the academic study of literature is known as Letters...
through the ages. The fact of adultery has been a part of the
human existenceThe human condition refers to the distinctive features of human existence. As finite and mortal entities, there are series of features that are common to most human lives, and some that are inevitable for all. These features and the human response to them constitute the human condition...
for as long as there has been
marriageMarriage is a social union or legal contract between individuals that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged by a variety of ways, depending on the culture or demographic...
, so this is hardly surprising. As a theme it brings intense emotions into the foreground, and has consequences for all concerned. It also automatically brings its own conflict, between the people concerned and between sexual desires and a sense of loyalty.
As marriage and family are often regarded as basis of society a story of adultery often shows the conflict between social pressure and individual struggle for happiness.
In the
BibleThe Bible contains the central religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. Modern Judaism generally recognizes a single set of canonical books known as the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, as it is written almost entirely in the Hebrew language, with some small portions in Aramaic...
, incidents of adultery are present almost from the start.
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The theme of
adulteryAdultery is referred to as extramarital sex, philandery, or infidelity, but does not include fornication. The term "adultery" for many people carries a moral or religious association, while the term "extramarital sex" is morally or judgmentally neutral....
has been used in a wide range of
literatureLiterature is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means "acquaintance with letters" , and therefore the academic study of literature is known as Letters...
through the ages. The fact of adultery has been a part of the
human existenceThe human condition refers to the distinctive features of human existence. As finite and mortal entities, there are series of features that are common to most human lives, and some that are inevitable for all. These features and the human response to them constitute the human condition...
for as long as there has been
marriageMarriage is a social union or legal contract between individuals that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged by a variety of ways, depending on the culture or demographic...
, so this is hardly surprising. As a theme it brings intense emotions into the foreground, and has consequences for all concerned. It also automatically brings its own conflict, between the people concerned and between sexual desires and a sense of loyalty.
As marriage and family are often regarded as basis of society a story of adultery often shows the conflict between social pressure and individual struggle for happiness.
In the
BibleThe Bible contains the central religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. Modern Judaism generally recognizes a single set of canonical books known as the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, as it is written almost entirely in the Hebrew language, with some small portions in Aramaic...
, incidents of adultery are present almost from the start. The story of
AbrahamAbraham is the founding patriarch of the Israelites, Ishmaelites, Midianites and Edomite peoples, as described in the book of Genesis. He is widely regarded as the patriarch of Jews, Christians, and Muslims....
contains several incidents and serve as warnings or stories of sin and forgiveness. Abraham attempts to continue his blood line through his wife's maidservant, with consequences that continue through history.
JacobJacob , also known as Israel , was the third Biblical patriarch and ancestor of the twelve tribes of Israel, named after ten of his twelve sons, as well as the two sons of his son Joseph.The Bible says...
's family life is complicated with similar incidents.
ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
wrote three plays in which the perception of adultery plays a significant part. In both
OthelloOthello, the Moor of Venice is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1603, and based on the Italian short story "Un Capitano Moro" by Cinthio, a disciple of Boccaccio, first published in 1565...
and
The Winter's TaleThe Winter's Tale is a play by William Shakespeare, first published in the First Folio in 1623. Although it was listed as a comedy when it first appeared, some modern editors have relabeled the play a romance. Some critics, among them W. W...
the downfall of the protagonist is brought about by his belief that his wife is unfaithful. In "
The Merry Wives of WindsorThe Merry Wives of Windsor is a comedy by William Shakespeare, first published in 1602, though believed to have been written prior to 1597. It features the fat knight Sir John Falstaff, and is Shakespeare's only play to deal exclusively with contemporary Elizabethan era English middle class life...
," Falstaff initiates an ingenious adulterous plot which prompts elaborate and repeated revenge by the wronged wives; the comedy of the play hides a deeper anxiety about the infidelity of women.
The following works of literature have adultery and its consequences as one of their major themes. (M) and (F) stand for
adulterer and
adulteress respectively.
DramaDrama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective...
- Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright best known for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Zoo Story, A Delicate Balance and Seascape . His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition...
: Marriage PlayMarriage Play is a drama for two actors by Edward Albee.The play opens with a blow. Jack enters home and informs his wife, that after thirty years of being married to her he intends to leave. Gillian does not react as he would expect and therefore he enters three times more. Answers of Gillian make...
(M, ?F)
- Simon Gray
Simon James Holliday Gray, CBE , was a British playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years...
: Japes (F)
- Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include awards-winning plays such as All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible.Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and...
: Broken GlassBroken Glass is the fourth album by Crowbar released on October 29, 1996.-Track listing:#"Conquering" – 2:48 #"Like Broken Glass" – 3:43 #" Turn Away from Dying" – 5:00 #"Wrath of Time Be Judgement" – 3:32 #"Nothing" – 5:29...
(F)
- Peter Nichols
Peter Nichols is an English writer of stage plays, film and television.Born in Bristol, England, he was educated at Bristol Grammar School, and then did his National Service in the RAF for three years, going on to study acting at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. While he was working as a...
: Passion Play (M,F)
- Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE , was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, director, political activist and poet. He was among the most influential British playwrights of modern times...
: The HomecomingThe Homecoming is a two-act award-winning play written in 1964 by Nobel laureate, Harold Pinter. First published in 1965, the original Broadway production won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play and its 40th-anniversary Broadway production at the Cort Theatre was nominated for a 2008 Tony Award for...
(F)
- William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
: The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of VeniceOthello, the Moor of Venice is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1603, and based on the Italian short story "Un Capitano Moro" by Cinthio, a disciple of Boccaccio, first published in 1565...
(no adulterers/esses, though the plot revolves around the perception of adultery)
- William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
: The Winter's TaleThe Winter's Tale is a play by William Shakespeare, first published in the First Folio in 1623. Although it was listed as a comedy when it first appeared, some modern editors have relabeled the play a romance. Some critics, among them W. W...
the suspicion of adultery initiates the plot
- Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director and essayist, primarily known for his operas...
: Tristan und IsoldeTristan und Isolde is an opera, or music drama, in three acts by Richard Wagner to a German libretto by the composer, based largely on the romance by Gottfried von Straßburg...
based on the legend of Tristan and IseultThe legend of Tristan and Iseult is an influential romance and tragedy, retold in numerous sources with as many variations. The tragic story is of the adulterous love between the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Iseult...
(F)
- Hugh Whitemore
Hugh Whitemore is an English playwright and screenwriter.Whitemore studied for the stage at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he is now a Member of the Council. He began his writing career in British television with both original teleplays and adaptations of classic works by Charles...
: Disposing of the Body (M,F)
- The Who
The Who are an English rock band formed in 1964. The primary lineup consisted of guitarist Pete Townshend, vocalist Roger Daltrey, bassist John Entwistle, and drummer Keith Moon. They became known for energetic live performances including the pioneering spectacle of instrument destruction...
: TommyTommy is a given name that is the English diminutive of Thomas and could refer to:- People with the given name Tommy :* Tommy Cooper, prop comedian and magician* Tommy DeBarge, American R'n'B musician formerly of the band Switch...
(F)
- Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams , né Thomas Lanier Williams, was an American playwright who received many of the top theatrical awards for his works of drama...
: Baby DollBaby Doll is a 1956 film which tells the story of the childlike bride of a Mississippi cotton gin owner, who becomes the pawn in a battle between her husband and his enemy. It stars Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach and Mildred Dunnock...
(F)
- William Wycherley
William Wycherley was an English dramatist of the Restoration period, best known for the plays The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer.-Biography:...
: The Country WifeThe Country Wife is a Restoration comedy written in 1675 by William Wycherley. A product of the tolerant early Restoration period, the play reflects an aristocratic and anti-Puritan ideology, and was controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time. Even its title contains a lewd pun...
(F)
FictionFiction is a branch of literature which deals, in part or in whole, with temporally contrafactual events...
- Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than twenty novels, three collections of poetry, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism...
: That Uncertain FeelingThat Uncertain Feeling is a comic novel by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1956.In 1962, the book was made into a film starring Peter Sellers, with the title changed to Only Two Can Play...
(M,F)
- Malcolm Bradbury
Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was a British author and academic.-Life:Born in 1932 in Sheffield, Bradbury was the son of a railwayman; his family moved to London in 1935, but returned to Sheffield in 1941 with his brother and mother...
: The History ManThe History Man is a campus novel by the British author Malcolm Bradbury set in 1972 in the fictional seaside town of Watermouth in the South of England. Watermouth bears some resemblance to Brighton. For example, there is a frequent and fast train service to London.-Plot introduction:Howard Kirk...
(M,F)
- John Braine
John Gerard Braine was an English novelist. Braine is usually associated with the Angry Young Men movement.-Biography:...
: The Jealous GodThe Jealous God is a novel by John Braine which was first published in 1964. Set in the early 1960s among the Irish Catholic community in a small Yorkshire town, the book is about a 30 year-old mummy's boy and his attempts at liberating himself from his domineering mother...
(M,F)
- Charlotte Bronte
Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters whose novels are English literature standards...
: Jane EyreJane Eyre is a famous and influential novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published in London, England in 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. with the title Jane Eyre...
(M,F)
- James M. Cain
James Mallahan Cain was an American author and journalist. Although Cain himself vehemently opposed labelling, he is usually associated with the hardboiled school of American crime fiction and seen as one of the creators of the roman noir...
: The Postman Always Rings TwiceThe Postman Always Rings Twice is a 1934 crime novel by James M. Cain.The novel was quite successful and notorious upon publication, and is regarded as one of the more important crime novels of the 20th century...
(F)
- Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer was an English author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Although he wrote many works, he is best remembered for his unfinished frame narrative The Canterbury Tales...
: The Canterbury Tales The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century . The tales are contained inside a frame tale and told by a collection of pilgrims on a pilgrimage from Southwark to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral...
(M,F)
- Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin was an American author of short stories and novels, mostly of a Louisiana Creole background...
: The AwakeningThe Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899 . Set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana coast at the end of the nineteenth century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the...
(F)
- Albert Cohen
Albert Cohen was a Greek-born Sephardic Jewish Swiss novelist who wrote in French. He worked as a civil servant for various international organizations, such as the International Labour Organization. He became a Swiss citizen in 1919.BiographyBorn, Abraham Albert Cohen, in Corfu, Greece, in 1895...
: Belle du Seigneur (F)
- Ivy Compton-Burnett
Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, DBE was an English novelist, published as I. Compton-Burnett. She was awarded the 1955 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel Mother and Son....
: A Heritage and Its HistoryA Heritage and Its History is a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett first published in 1959 by Victor Gollancz.-Plot summary:69-year-old Sir Edwin Challoner lives with his extended family in a grand old house in rural Southern England. Unmarried, he has no direct issue, and the person closest to him is...
(F)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the Twenties...
: The Great GatsbyThe Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published on April 10, 1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City during the summer of 1922 and is a critique of the American Dream....
(M,F); Tender Is the NightTender Is the Night is an English language novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was first published in Scribner's Magazine between January-April, 1934 in four issues. It is ranked #28 on the Modern Library's list of the 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century.In 1932, Fitzgerald's wife Zelda Sayre...
(M,F)
- Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style...
: Madame BovaryMadame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather...
(F)
- Theodor Fontane
Theodor Fontane was a German novelist and poet, regarded by many to be the most important 19th-century German-language realist writer.-Youth:Fontane was born in Neuruppin into a Huguenot family...
: Effi BriestEffi Briest is widely considered to be Theodor Fontane’s masterpiece and one of the most famous German realist novels of all time. Thomas Mann once said that if one had to reduce one’s library to six novels, Effi Briest would have to be one of them...
(M,F)
- Ford Maddox Ford: The Good Soldier
The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion is a 1915 novel by English novelist Ford Madox Ford. It is set just before World War I and chronicles the tragedies of the lives of two seemingly perfect couples. The novel is told using a series of flashbacks in non-chronological order, a literary technique...
(M,F)
- C.S. Forester: Flying Colours
Flying Colours is a Horatio Hornblower novel by C.S. Forester, originally published 1938 as the third in the series, but now eighth by internal chronology...
, Lord HornblowerLord Hornblower is a Horatio Hornblower novel written by C. S. Forester.In 1814, Hornblower is delegated to deal with the Flame, a brig full of mutineers off the French coast, near the mouth of the Seine...
(M)
- Ellen Glasgow
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was a Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist. Born in Richmond, VA, she published her first novel, The Descendant, in 1897, when she was 24 years old...
: VirginiaVirginia is a novel by Ellen Glasgow about a wife and mother who in vain seeks happiness by serving her family. This novel, her eleventh, marked a clear departure from Glasgow's previous work -- she had written a series of bestsellers before publishing Virginia -- in that it attacked, in a subtle...
(M)
- Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...
: The end of the affairThe End of the Affair is a novel by British author Graham Greene, as well as the title of two feature films that were adapted for the screen based on the novel....
(F); The Heart of the MatterThe Heart of the Matter is a novel by British author Graham Greene. It was the winner in 1948 of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction...
(M)
- Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon is a British novelist and poet, best known for his 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.- Life and work :...
: A Spot of BotherA Spot of Bother is the second adult novel by Mark Haddon, who is best known for his prize-winning first novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time...
(F)
- Josephine Hart
Josephine Hart, Lady Saatchi is an Irish writer, theater producer and television presenter. She is widely known as author of the novel Damage, which was itself the basis for a film directed by Louis Malle and featuring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche....
: DamageDamage is a 1991 novel by Josephine Hart about a British politician who, in the prime of life, causes his own downfall through an inappropriate relationship...
(M)
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hathorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne...
: The Scarlet LetterThe Scarlet Letter is a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, considered to be his "magnum opus". Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who gives birth after committing adultery and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity...
(F)
- Carl Hiaasen
Carl Hiaasen is an American journalist, columnist and novelist.- Biography :Born and raised in Plantation, Florida, of Norwegian heritage, Hiaasen was the first of four children and the son of a lawyer, Kermit Odel, and teacher, Patricia...
: Skinny Dip (M)
- Francis Iles: Malice Aforethought
Malice Aforethought is a murder mystery novel written by Anthony Berkeley Cox, using the pen name Francis Iles. It involves a Devon physician who slowly poisons his domineering wife so that he may be with the woman he loves. It is an early and prominent example of the "inverted detective story",...
(M)
- John Irving
John Winslow Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978...
: The World According to GarpThe World According to Garp is John Irving's fourth novel. Published in 1978, the book was a bestseller for several years.A movie adaptation starring Robin Williams was released in 1982, with a screenplay written by Steve Tesich.-Plot:...
(M,F)
- Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera is a Czech and French writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981...
: The Unbearable Lightness of BeingThe Unbearable Lightness of Being , by Milan Kundera, is a philosophic novel about a man and his two women and their lives in the Prague Spring of the Czechoslovak Communist period in 1968...
(M)
- D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English author, poet, playwright, essayist and literary critic. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
: Lady Chatterley's LoverLady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence written in 1928.Printed in Florence, Italy, in 1928, it was not printed in the United Kingdom until 1960...
(F)
- David Lodge
David John Lodge CBE, is a British author. Lodge often satirises academia in general and the humanities in particular in his novels...
: Thinks ...Thinks ... is a novel by British author David Lodge.-Plot summary:The novel is exclusively set at the University of Gloucester, based loosely on the University of York thanks to the author's brief residence there...
(M)
- William Somerset Maugham: Liza of Lambeth
Liza of Lambeth was W. Somerset Maugham's first novel, which he wrote while working as a doctor at a hospital in Lambeth, then a working class district of London. It depicts the short life and death of Liza Kemp, an 18-year-old factory worker who lives together with her aging mother in Vere Street...
(M)
- Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include awards-winning plays such as All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible.Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and...
: The CrucibleThe Crucible is a 1953 play by Arthur Miller. It is a dramatization of the Salem witchcraft trials that took place in Province of Massachusetts Bay during 1692 and 1693. Miller wrote the play as a response to McCarthyism, when the US government blacklisted accused communists...
(M,F)
- Nicholas Mosley
Nicholas Mosley, 3rd Baron Ravensdale, 7th Baronet MC is a British novelist. He is the eldest son of Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet and Lady Cynthia Mosley, a daughter of Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary...
: Natalie NataliaNatalie Natalia is a novel by Nicholas Mosley first published in 1971 about a middle-aged British MP who, while seemingly on the brink of insanity, conducts an adulterous affair with the wife of a colleague.-Plot summary:...
(M)
- Iris Murdoch
Dame Iris Murdoch DBE was an English author and philosopher, best known for her novels about sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 2001 by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100...
: A Severed HeadA Severed Head is a satirical, sometimes farcical 1961 novel by Iris Murdoch.Primary themes include marriage, adultery, and incest within a group of civilized and educated people. Set in and around London, it depicts a power struggle between grown-up middle class people who are lucky to be free of...
(M,F)
- John O'Hara
John Henry O'Hara was an American writer born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. He initially made a name for himself with his short stories and later became a best-selling novelist whose works include Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8. He was particularly known for an uncannily accurate ear for...
: Elizabeth AppletonElizabeth Appleton is a novel by John O'Hara first published in 1963 about a rich New York woman born in 1910 who, aged 21, marries beneath her. She follows her husband to his hometown in Pennsylvania, where he enjoys a modest academic career as a Professor of History...
(F)
- Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet and writer. In the West he is best known for his epic novel Doctor Zhivago, a tragedy whose events span the last period of Tsarist Russia and the early days of the Soviet Union. It was first translated and published in Italy in 1957...
: Doctor ZhivagoDoctor Zhivago is a 20th century novel by Boris Pasternak, first published in 1957. The novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a medical doctor and poet. It tells the story of a man torn between two women, set primarily against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the...
(M)
- Raymond Radiguet
Raymond Radiguet was a French author.He was born in Saint-Maur, Val-de-Marne close to Paris, the son of a caricaturist. In 1917 he moved to the city. Soon he would drop out of the Lycée Charlemagne, where he studied, in order to pursue his interests in journalism and literature...
: Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel (F)
- Irwin Shaw
Irwin Shaw was an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author.-Life:Shaw was born Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff in the South Bronx, New York City, to Russian Jewish immigrants. His parents were Rose and Will. His younger brother, David Shaw , became a noted Hollywood producer...
: Lucy CrownLucy Crown is a novel by Irwin Shaw first published in 1956. It is about a wife and mother—the eponymous character—who, in the summer of 1937, begins an affair with a young man whom the Crowns have hired as a companion for their fragile son Tony....
(F)
- Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath. As a poet, novelist, musician, and playwright, he reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries...
: The Home and the WorldThe Home and the World 1916 is a 1916 novel by Rabindranath Tagore.-Plot summary:The book is set in early 20th century India in the estate of the rich Bengali noble Nikhil...
(F)
- Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy , was a Russian writer widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists. His masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina represent in their scope, breadth and vivid depiction of 19th-century Russian life and attitudes, the peak of realist...
: Anna KareninaAnna Karenina is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger...
(F)
- Scott Turow
Scott Turow is an American author as well as a practicing lawyer. Turow has written eight fiction and two nonfiction books, which have been translated into over 20 languages and have sold over 25 million copies...
: Presumed InnocentPresumed Innocent, published in 1987, is Scott Turow's first novel, which tells the story of a prosecutor charged with the murder of his colleague. It is told in the first person by the accused, Rusty Sabich....
(M)
- Fay Weldon
Fay Weldon CBE is an English author, essayist and playwright, whose work has been associated with feminism. In her fiction, Weldon typically portrays contemporary women who find themselves trapped in oppressive situations caused by the patriarchal structure of western, and in particular British,...
: The Life and Loves of a She-DevilThe Life and Loves of a She-Devil is a 1983 novel by British feminist author Fay Weldon about a plain woman who, when she finds out she is being betrayed by her husband, goes to great lengths to take revenge on him and his lover, romantic novelist Mary Fisher...
(M)
- Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton was an American novelist, short story writer and designer.- Early life :Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones to parents George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander. She had two brothers, Frederic Rhinelander and Henry Edward. The saying "Keeping up with the Joneses" is...
: Ethan FromeEthan Frome is a novel that was published in 1911 by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Edith Wharton. It is set in turn-of-the-century New England in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. The novel was adapted into a film in 1993....
(M)
- A. N. Wilson
Andrew Norman Wilson , is an English writer, known for his critical biographies, novels and works of popular and cultural history. He is also a columnist for the London Evening Standard and was an occasional contributor to the Daily Mail,Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and...
: ScandalScandal, or Priscilla's Kindness is a satirical novel by A. N. Wilson first published in 1983 about a British politician's rise and fall, the latter caused by a relationship with a prostitute...
(M,F)
- Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer.- Life :...
: Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. Von D (M)
- James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish expatriate author, playwright and poet of the 20th century. He is known for his landmark novel Ulysses and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake , as well as the short story collection Dubliners and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of...
: UlyssesUlysses is a novel by James Joyce, first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922, in Paris...
(F)