All genres

Biography & memoir

Lives told by others and by the people who lived them, plus diaries and letters.

Landmark works

Most widely known first.

  1. 1850 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens · read free
  2. 1913 Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence · read free
  3. 1934 I, Claudius by Robert Graves
  4. 1947 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
  5. 1992 Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby
  6. 1822 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey · read free
  7. 1985 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
  8. 1857 Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes
  9. 1929 Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves
  10. 1796 Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft
  11. Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman · read free
  12. 1933 Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
  13. 1775 A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland by Samuel Johnson
  14. 1779 Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets by Samuel Johnson · read free
  15. 1798 Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by William Godwin
  16. Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge · read free
  17. 1921 Sea and Sardinia by D. H. Lawrence
  18. 1928 Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon
  19. 1938 Count Belisarius by Robert Graves
  20. 1957 The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh
  21. Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
  22. 1857 The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell
  23. 2014 H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
  24. 1744 Life of Mr Richard Savage by Samuel Johnson
  25. 1907 Father and Son by Edmund Gosse · read free
  26. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley by Aleister Crowley
  27. 1918 Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey · read free
  28. 1988 What Am I Doing Here by Bruce Chatwin
  29. 1992 Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud
  30. 1666 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners by John Bunyan

Writers

And 29 more

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