Recommendations
Books Like Great Expectations
Best books to read after Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Great Expectations is Dickens's most formally perfect achievement and the English novel's definitive treatment of class, ambition, and self-knowledge. These books extend the conversation into Dickens's wider canon, the Victorian novel tradition, and the bildungsroman form that Great Expectations perfects.
- 1Buy
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's own favorite and the closest companion to Great Expectations — another first-person bildungsroman with strong autobiographical elements, following David from childhood through early adulthood.
- 2Buy
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's most ambitious novel — a satirical panorama of the English legal system through the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case, with a dual narrative and one of literature's most sympathetic detectives. The choice for Dickens at full stretch.
- 3Buy
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
The Victorian bildungsroman that most directly parallels Great Expectations — an orphan who rises through determination, dignity, and the refusal to compromise her integrity, in a similarly Gothic atmosphere.
- 4Buy
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
George Eliot's masterpiece and the greatest English novel — a panoramic study of provincial life in the Midlands, featuring multiple plots centered on the question of what a person can become given the circumstances of their birth.
- 5Buy
North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell's novel of class, industry, and romance between a southern clergyman's daughter and a northern mill owner — the social-novel companion to Dickens that takes the Victorian class system from a different and equally illuminating angle.
- 6Buy
Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's earliest and most archetypal orphan novel — the template for Great Expectations's Pip, and the rawest expression of Dickens's rage at Victorian poverty and the treatment of children by institutions.
- 7Buy
A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's historical novel set during the French Revolution — the most plot-driven of his major works and the most immediately exciting, built around one of literature's great acts of self-sacrifice.
- 8Buy
The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James's masterpiece about an American woman who goes to Europe and is destroyed by the freedom she thought she was choosing — the successor to the Victorian novel's interest in class, self-determination, and the cost of ambition.
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