After a family disaster our protagonist, Lucy Snowe, travels to Villette where she teaches at an all girl's school and gets wrapped up in romance and adventures.

By James Baldwin. Written in 1895.

This is the debut novel of English author Anne Brontë, first published in December 1847 ( and originally written under the pen name, Acton Bell). The novel follows governess Agnes Grey as she works with the families of the English gentry, and is considered to be largely based on Brontë's own experiences as a governess. The novel addresses the position of governess and what it entailed, and how it affected a young woman. Cover by @FrankRSP

"The Masque of the Red Death", originally published as "The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy" (1842), is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The story follows Prince Prospero's attempts to avoid a dangerous plague, known as the Red Death, by hiding in his abbey. He, along with many other wealthy nobles, hosts a masquerade ball within seven rooms of the abbey, each decorated with a different color. In the midst of their revelry, a mysterious figure disguised as a Red Death victim enters and makes his way through each of the rooms. Prospero dies after confronting this stranger, whose "costume" proves to contain nothing tangible inside it; the guests also die in turn. Cover by the lovely @CaffeinatedKiwi

Fantine is a fictional character in Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables. She is a young orphaned grisette in Paris who becomes pregnant by a rich student. After he abandons her, she is forced to look after their child, Cosette, on her own. Originally a pretty and naïve girl, Fantine is eventually forced by circumstances to become a prostitute, selling her hair and front teeth, losing her beauty and health. The money she earns is sent to support her daughter. Fantine became an archetype of self-abnegation and devoted motherhood. Possibly due to her status as an orphan, Hugo never labels her with a surname. She has been portrayed by many actresses in stage and screen versions of the story and has been depicted in works of art. Cover by: @Theygotgone

Written by Johanna Spyri in 1889/1880. Heidi is a beloved book for children and has since been read and enjoyed for more than a century.

A short story by author Robert Louis Stevenson.

The Iron Heel is a dystopian novel by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908. Generally considered to be "the earliest of the modern Dystopian" fiction, it chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. It is arguably the novel in which Jack London's socialist views are most explicitly on display. A forerunner of soft science fiction novels and stories of the 1960s and '70s, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes. The book is unusual among London's writings (and in the literature of the time in general) in being a first-person narrative of a woman protagonist written by a man. Much of the narrative is set in the San Francisco Bay Area, including events in San Francisco and Sonoma County.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented is a novel by Thomas Hardy. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper The Graphic in 1891 and in book form in 1892. Though now considered a major nineteenth-century English novel and possibly Hardy's fictional masterpiece, Tess of the d'Urbervilles received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual morals of late Victorian England.

Original work of Arthur Conan Doyle