Pre-Raphaelite Fiction
Explore the best Pre-Raphaelite fiction books—timeless tales of romance, art, and Victorian allure. Discover must-read novels inspired by the Brotherhood's legacy.
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Pale as the Dead
by Fiona Mountain
Struggling to find the roots of her own heritage, genealogist Natasha Blake discovers a strange connection between a missing model and a pre-Raphaelite artist in this acclaimed debut mystery. Martin's Press.
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Mortal Love
by Elizabeth Hand
In the Victorian Age, a mysterious and irresistible woman becomes entwined in the lives of several artists, both as a muse and as the object of all-consuming obsession. Radborne Comstock, one of the early twentieth century's most brilliant young painters, is helpless under her dangerous spell. In modern-day London, journalist Daniel Rowlands meets a beguiling woman who holds the secret to invaluable -- and lost -- Pre-Raphaelite paintings, while wealthy dilettante-actor Valentine Comstock is consumed by enigmatic visions. Swirling between eras and continents, Mortal Love is the intense tale of unforgettable characters caught in a whirlwind of art, love, and intrigue that will take your breath away.
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Possession
by A. S. Byatt
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A tale of two young scholars researching the secret love affair of two Victorian poets that's an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. “Gorgeously written … A tour de force.” —The New York Times Book Review Winner of England’s Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession traces the lives of a pair of young academics as they uncover a clandestine relationship between two long-dead Victorian poets. As they unearth their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany—what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.
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Ivy
by Julie Hearn
Ivy is used to being overlooked. The youngest in a family of thieves, scoundrels, and roustabouts, the girl with the flame-colored hair and odd-colored eyes is declared useless by her father from the day she is born. But that's only if you look at her but don't see. For Ivy has a quality that makes people take notice. It's more than beauty -- and it draws people toward her. Which makes her the perfect subject for an aspiring painter named Oscar Aretino Frosdick, a member of the pre-Raphaelite school of artists. Oscar is determined to make his mark on the art world, with Ivy as his model and muse. But behind Ivy's angelic looks lurk dark secrets and a troubled past -- a past that has given her an unfortunate taste for laudanum. And when treachery and jealousy surface in the Eden that is the artist's garden, Ivy must learn to be more than a pretty face if she is to survive. Julie Hearn, author of The Minister's Daughter and The Sign of the Raven, has created a memorable tale of nineteenth-century England with a character destined to take her place alongside Dickens's Pip and Oliver Twist.
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The Gates of Sleep
by Mercedes Lackey
Mercedes Lackey's magical Elemental Masters series recasts familiar fairy tales in a richly-imagined alternate Victorian world For seventeen years, Marina Roeswood had lived in an old, rambling farmhouse in rural Cornwall in the care of close friends of her wealthy, aristocratic parents. As the ward of bohemian artists in Victorian England, she had grown to be a free thinker in an environment of fertile creativity and cultural sophistication. But the real core of her education was far outside societal norms. For she and her foster parents were Elemental Masters of magic, and learning to control her growing powers was Marina’s primary focus. But though Marina’s life seemed idyllic, her existence was riddled with mysteries. Why, for example, had she never seen her parents, or been to Oakhurst, her family’s ancestral manor? And why hadn’t her real parents, also Elemental Masters, trained her themselves? That there was a secret about all this she had known from the time she had begun to question the world around her. Yet try as she might, she could get no clues out of her guardians. But Marina would have answers to her questions all too soon. For with the sudden death of her birth parents, Marina met her new guardian—her father’s eldest sister Arachne. Aunt Arachne exuded a dark magical aura unlike anything Marina had encountered, a stifling evil that seemed to threaten Marina’s very spirit. Slowly Marina realized that her aunt was the embodiment of the danger her parents had been hiding her from in the backwoods of Cornwall. But could Marina unravel the secrets of her life in time to save herself from the evil that had been seeking her for nearly eighteen years?
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The Wayward Muse
by Elizabeth Hickey
From the critically acclaimed author of "The Painted Kiss" comes a rich and romantic story of the passionate love triangle between William Morris, founder of the Arts and Crafts movement; his mentor, the painter Daunt Gabriel Rossetti; and the woman they both love.
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False Dawn
by Edith Wharton
Lewis Raycie is sent on a Grand Tour of Europe with instructions from his father to acquire a collection of accepted art works. His father's dream is to own a Raphael; instead, Lewis returns with a priceless collection of Renaissance masterpieces by Piero della Francesca - and others of equal stature. They are, however, unknown in America. His father is appalled and disinherits him. His family ridicule him. But it is only after Lewis dies that the magnificent collection gets the recognition it really deserves.
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Muriélle
by James Kaye
I met a Lady Full beautiful, a faery's child; Her hair was long. She took me to her elfin grot And there we slumbered on the moss. Excerpted from La Belle Dame sans Merci Keats-1819 Muriélle is about artistic vision and sensual awakening; the story of a young model coming of age while sitting for one of John William Waterhouse's most popular works of art, La Belle Dame sans Merci, 1893, (front cover) inspired by his model and based on the poem by Keats
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The Dreaming Damozel
by Mollie Hardwick
The author of Upstairs, Downstairs continues her internationally bestselling mystery series. Antique dealer Doran Fairweather is absolutely elated to find a beautiful little oil painting portraying the doomed Pre-Raphealite Lizzie Siddal. When she discovers a girl's body floating in a pond, she's shocked at how the death scene mirrors the painting. Martin's Press.
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Lady Audley's Secret
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
This novel, with its most untypically forceful heroine, can be seen as an anticipation of Ibsen's great dramas, and as an unabashed bid for freedom from the constraints of Victorian womanhood.
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The Children's Book
by Antonia Susan Byatt
A tale spanning the end of the Victorian era through World War I finds famous children's book author Olive Wellwood taking in a runaway and exposing the boy to dark truths about her family's summer bacchanals at their rambling country house.
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The Wandering Heart
by Mary Malloy
A forensic thriller like Byatt's Possession that pursues secrets going back to the Crusades.