# Victorian Fiction: Society, Ambition & the Human Heart

Victorian novelists mapped the tensions between individual desire and social expectation with unrivalled depth. Two free classics from Cyber Library, two essential annotated editions.

Source: https://www.cyberlibrary.org/en/lists/victorian-fiction/

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## Great Expectations — Free

Author: Charles Dickens
Read online (free, public domain): https://www.cyberlibrary.org/en/books/great-expectations/

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

## Jane Eyre — Free

Author: Charlotte Bronte
Read online (free, public domain): https://www.cyberlibrary.org/en/books/jane-eyre/

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so pe...

## Middlemarch — Kindle

Author: George Eliot (1871)
Buy on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SI02C8W?tag=cyberlibrar00-20

Dorothea Brooke's idealism and Lydgate's medical ambitions collide in a richly observed provincial town.

## North and South — Kindle

Author: Elizabeth Gaskell (1855)
Buy on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071XV8965?tag=cyberlibrar00-20

Southern Margaret Hale moves north and clashes with mill-owner Thornton — Pride and Prejudice with a factory.