The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
(1880s New York heiress rejects ways of society to 'be herself')
Against the Odds
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1800s Yorkshire: a woman loves brutal, "child-of-nature" foster-brother)
Hermann Hesse, Gertrud (1890s German university: two students, friends, love the same woman)
Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris (14th-century Paris: hunchback tries to protect beautiful gipsy from mne who would debauch her)
Helen Waddell, Peter Abelard (12-th century Paris: a monk falls in love with beautiful pupil)
"Playthings of Destiny"
Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd (tragic life and love in 19th-century rural England)
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (two girls" ambitions to conquer 1810s English high society)
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (ambition, crime and punishment in lower class 1920s New York)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (New England family cursed for generations because of religious intolerance)
Pressure to Conform
John Updike, Rabbit, Run (ex-high-school sports star tries to adjust to adult mediocrity)
Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne (snobbery, illegitimacy and inheritance among 19th-century English landed gentry)
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (wealthy, morally empty merchant tries to break free of sterile small-town conformity)
Angus Wilson, Late Call (widow lives with uncongenial son in soulless 1960s British "new town")
Stifling Communities
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (mid-19th-century small-town France)
Olivia Manning, The Rain Forest (retreat for psychological misfits on island "paradise")
Alison Lurie, The War Between the Tates ("progressive" US university)
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid"s Tale (21st-century fundamentalist Republic of Gilead)