Recommendations
Books Like The Winter's Tale
Best books to read after The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare
Readers who love The Winter's Tale are drawn to its combination of the shocking first half's tragedy of Leontes's jealousy and the miraculous second half's resurrection of Hermione, the formal daring of a play in two halves separated by sixteen years, and the extraordinary statue scene. They want works that deal with jealousy and recovery, loss and recovery of the beloved, and the tradition of Shakespeare's late romances.
- 1Buy
The Tempest
by William Shakespeare
The companion late romance written in the same period — both The Winter's Tale and The Tempest are plays about loss, recovery, and the magic of theatre; reading both together reveals Shakespeare's late style at its most distinctive.
- 2Buy
Pericles
by William Shakespeare
The earlier late romance that establishes the pattern The Winter's Tale perfects — Pericles's lost and recovered daughter Marina anticipates Leontes's lost and recovered Perdita; the two plays are the most similar in the late romance sequence.
- 3Buy
Jealousy
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
The French novel inhabiting the same psychological territory as Leontes's delusional jealousy — Robbe-Grillet's unnamed narrator's obsessive surveillance of his wife is the novelistic equivalent of Leontes's paranoia; one of the great literary studies of pathological jealousy.
- 4Buy
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
The great novel about jealousy and its costs — Karenin's jealousy of Vronsky and the social destruction that follows shares The Winter's Tale's concern with what jealousy destroys in both the jealous person and those around them; the most devastating novelistic treatment of marital jealousy.
- 5Buy
Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
The Gothic novel of retrospective jealousy — the narrator's jealousy of the dead Rebecca inhabits a similar territory to Leontes's constructed jealousy; both works are about jealousy as a function of imagination rather than evidence.
- 6Buy
Pandosto
by Robert Greene
Shakespeare's primary source — Greene's 1588 romance tells the same story but with a darker ending (the King kills himself when he discovers Perdita is his daughter); reading the source reveals exactly how Shakespeare transformed the ending toward redemption and forgiveness.
- 7Buy
The Invention of Love
by Tom Stoppard
The play about A.E. Housman and the loss of youth that shares The Winter's Tale's structure — Stoppard's old Housman encountering his young self parallels the structure of recovering what was lost to time; both works are about the impossibility and yet the necessity of returning to what was abandoned.
- 8Buy
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The great Victorian novel about marriage and its aftermath — Casaubon's jealousy of Will Ladislaw, Dorothea's suffering, and the eventual recovery of Dorothea's capacity for love shares The Winter's Tale's arc of jealousy, destruction, and eventual restoration.
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