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Curated category

British novels adapted into television shows

  • James BondJames Bond was born from a very deliberate act of boredom management. On the 17th of February 1952, Ian Fleming sat down at his Goldeneye estate in…
  • The Pickwick PapersThe Pickwick Papers arrived in British readers' hands not as a novel but as a commission to explain a set of comic drawings.
  • A Christmas CarolA Christmas Carol was published on the 19th of December 1843, and by Christmas Eve the entire first run of 6,000 copies had sold out.
  • The Borrowers (novel)Mary Norton published The Borrowers in 1952 through Dent. This children's fantasy novel introduced a family of tiny people living secretly within the walls…
  • FrankensteinFrankenstein begins not with a monster but with a question whispered around a log fire. In the rainy summer of 1816, Mary Shelley sat at Lord Byron's Villa…
  • Jane EyreJane Eyre arrived in London bookshops on the 19th of October 1847, published under a pen name that gave nothing away: Currer Bell.
  • The Other Boleyn GirlThe Other Boleyn Girl opens in 1521, when a thirteen-year-old girl named Mary Boleyn is handed over to a king. Her father Thomas Boleyn and her uncle Thomas…
  • The War of the WorldsThe War of the Worlds, published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann, opens with a sentence that has unsettled readers for over a century: "Yet across…
  • The HobbitThe Hobbit, or There and Back Again begins with a sentence Tolkien wrote on a blank exam paper one day in the early 1930s: "In a hole in the ground there…
  • Pride and PrejudicePride and Prejudice opens with one of the most debated sentences in English literary history: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in…
  • Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryCharlie and the Chocolate Factory, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1964, began not in a writer's imagination but in a schoolboy's hands.
  • Heart of Darkness"The horror! The horror!" Those are the dying words of Kurtz, an ivory trader at the center of Heart of Darkness, the 1899 novella by Polish-British novelist…
  • To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse arrives with a question rather than a story: can a child's disappointment about a cancelled boat trip hold the whole weight of human…
  • Gulliver's TravelsGulliver's Travels arrived in London bookshops on the 28th of October 1726, priced at 8 shillings and 6 pence, and within days it had become the talk of the…
  • Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde begins not with a monster, but with a lawyer on a Sunday walk. Gabriel John Utterson, a reserved London solicitor…
  • The Lost World (Doyle novel)Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stood before the Royal Geographical Society on the 13th of February 1911. He listened intently as his friend Percy Harrison Fawcett…