Fictional Lives Through History
This collection features fictional biographies that weave personal narratives with historical events, offering a unique lens on the past. Each story presents a character's journey through significant moments in history, blending fact and fiction to explore identity, society, and the human experience.
A Journal of the Plague Year
The novel is a fictionalized account of one man's experiences of the year 1665, in which the Great Plague struck the city of London. The boo…
Orlando
A fictional biography following the adventures of Orlando: initially a gentleman, later a lady — always a poet — who romps through British h…
Marguerite de Valois
A historical fiction novel set in Paris (1572) during Charles IX's reign and the French Wars of Religion. Marguerite de Valois, daughter of …
Arabella Stuart
Lady Arabella Stuart was an English noblewoman at the beginning of the seventeenth century. At one time considered to be a possible successo…
Great Expectations
Great Expectations is written in the first person and is virtually a fictional autobiography of “Pip” from his childhood, through often pain…
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Johnson's only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, was originally published anonymously in 1912. It is a fictional novel written …
Benigna Machiavelli
In between "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) and Herland (1915), feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) wrote and published thi…
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s semi-autobiographical first novel. It traces the early life of Stephen Dedalus and his in…
The Mountebank
Andrew Lackaday, an English orphan, was born and brought up in a French circus. He becomes a highly skilled mimic and juggler. He plies his …
Katharine von Bora
This is a fictionalized biography of the wife of the reformer Dr. Martin Luther. In the author's words, he hopes that "people may learn…