Books like Villette, a novel
12 books with a reading profile close to Villette, a novel by Charlotte Brontë. Deep, inward-looking, contemplative and thought-provoking; a moderate read.
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1
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy, Margaret R. Higonnet
Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary
Tess Durbeyfield, a young woman living in the rural English countryside, discovers her family descends from the aristocratic d’Urberville line.
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2
A Prayer for Owen Meany
by John Irving
Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary
John Wheelwright narrates the life of his best friend, Owen Meany, a boy with a high-pitched voice who accidentally kills John’s mother with a foul ball during a Little League game in 1953.
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3
The Lowland
Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary
Subhash and Udayan are brothers born in Calcutta, separated by temperament and political conviction.
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4
The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai
Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary
Set in a crumbling house in the Himalayas against the 1980s Gorkhaland insurgency, the narrative follows Biju and Sai.
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5
The English Patient
Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary
Set in a ruined Tuscan villa during the final stages of the Second World War, the narrative centers on four fractured lives brought together by circumstance.
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6
Howards End
by E.M. Forster
Also deep and contemplative · narrative, literary
Set in Edwardian England, the narrative follows three families representing distinct social strata: the intellectual Schlegel sisters, the wealthy business-minded Wilcoxes, and the struggling clerk Leonard Bast.
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7
A Fine Balance
Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary
Set in mid-1970s India during the government-mandated Emergency, the narrative centers on four strangers cohabitating in a cramped apartment to survive economic hardship.
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8
The Stone Diaries
Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary
Daisy Goodwill Flett is born in 1905 in a Manitoba limestone quarry town, her mother dying in childbirth without knowing she was pregnant.
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9
A Streetcar Named Desire
Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary
Blanche DuBois, a displaced schoolteacher with a fragile mental state, arrives at the cramped New Orleans apartment of her sister, Stella, and brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.
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10
Martin Eden
by Jack London
Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary
Martin Eden, a coarse and uneducated sailor, decides to overhaul his entire identity after meeting Ruth Morse, a woman from a refined bourgeois family.
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11
On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
Also deep and contemplative · narrative, literary
The narrative center of the novel is the Belsey family, led by Howard, a white British art historian living in a fictional Massachusetts college town.
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12
The Marriage Plot
Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary
Set in the early 1980s, the story follows three Brown University graduates navigating the transition to adulthood.
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