Historical Fiction Classics: Free EPUB

The historical novel as a genre is usually dated to 1814, when Waverley appeared without its author’s name. Six years later Ivanhoe took the same machinery to twelfth-century England, and by 1844 Dumas was using it for the court of Louis XIII. The fourteen titles here span 1820 to 1905 and about three million words.

What they have in common is a borrowed century: a modern narrator walking a reader through a documented past, with a fictional protagonist placed where the records thin out. Scott invents a Saxon hero for the Norman court, Cooper puts a scout in the French and Indian War, Dumas hangs the fate of France on a Gascon’s temper.

Every historical novel on this shelf

Fourteen titles, oldest first. The setting is older than the book in every case.

Year	Title	Author	Form	Words	Reading time
1820	Ivanhoe	Walter Scott	Novel	192,000	11 h
1826	The Last of the Mohicans	James Fenimore Cooper	Novel	149,000	8 h
1844	The Count of Monte Cristo	Alexandre Dumas	Novel	466,000	26 h
1844	The Three Musketeers	Alexandre Dumas	Novel	226,061	13 h
1845	Twenty Years After	Alexandre Dumas	Novel	242,155	13 h
1850	The Scarlet Letter	Nathaniel Hawthorne	Novel	83,000	5 h
1859	A Tale of Two Cities	Charles Dickens	Novel	136,000	8 h
1862	Les Misérables	Victor Hugo	Novel	551,000	31 h
1869	War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	Novel	562,000	31 h
1881	The Prince and the Pauper	Mark Twain	Novel	66,000	4 h
1888	The Black Arrow	Robert Louis Stevenson	Novel	74,000	4 h
1889	The Master of Ballantrae	Robert Louis Stevenson	Novel	85,000	5 h
1891	The White Company	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	151,000	8 h
1905	The Scarlet Pimpernel	Baroness Orczy	Novel	86,000	5 h

How this list was made

Inclusion follows the Historical fiction genre recorded on each book page. Books whose past is a setting rather than an argument, such as the Gothic novels, stay on other shelves.

Publication years are the first editions named on the book pages, not the periods the novels describe — so Ivanhoe appears as 1820 and its story stays in 1194. Words and reading times come from the files offered here.

Questions readers ask

Where should I start?

Ivanhoe, at about 180,000 words, is the template: a tournament, a disguised king and a hero with a divided inheritance. If you want something faster, The Last of the Mohicans is shorter and moves quicker.

Are these accurate history?

They are novels, not chronicles. Scott and Cooper read the sources of their day and then rearranged them; the book pages note the real events where the stories touch them.

Why is Monte Cristo on a historical list?

Because its politics are dated to a specific moment, 1815 to 1838, and the plot turns on the Hundred Days and the restored monarchy. The Count is a creature of that decade.

Part of the complete catalogue and the themed reading lists. Nearby shelves: Satire · Short Stories · Romance · Memoir & Autobiography · Coming of Age · authors A–Z · word counts and reading times.