victorian fiction
4. H.G. Wells
H.G. Wells is a name rarely mentioned in discussions about Victorian literature but he is certainly one of the great Victorian novelists. He used science-fiction (a new genre in the late-Victorian period) to explore contemporary anxieties provoked by scientists such as Charles Darwin. His most celebrated novels are The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and both are highly fascinating.
5. Wilkie Collins
Wilkie Collins is another novelist who is under-appreciated today but he more than deserves a place on this list of great Victorian novelists. He wrote 30 novels and was the founder of the “sensation” genre – the precursor to detective fiction. The Woman and White and The Moonstone, Collins’ best-known novels, even outsold Dickens during the period.
6. George Eliot
George Eliot was actually a woman called Mary Anne Evans who, like most other female writers of the period, used a male pen name so that her works would be taken seriously. Her most famous works are The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede and Middlemarch and her novels show the lives of ordinary people in rural society.