Coming of Age Classics: Free EPUB Editions

The German word for it, Bildungsroman, describes a shape rather than a subject: a young person leaves home, meets the world, and is formed by the meeting. The seven novels here run from Northanger Abbey, published in 1817, to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist in 1916, and they disagree about whether the formation is a triumph.

Austen’s Catherine Morland is cured of reading too many Gothic novels; Jane Eyre is cured of nothing and keeps her own terms; David Copperfield learns to write; Stephen Dedalus flies past the nets of family, church and nation. The same plot, seven verdicts.

Every coming-of-age novel on this shelf

Seven titles, oldest first. All follow one person from ignorance to a costlier knowledge.

Year	Title	Author	Form	Words	Reading time
1817	Northanger Abbey	Jane Austen	Novel	80,264	4 h
1847	Jane Eyre	Charlotte Brontë	Novel	185,000	10 h
1850	David Copperfield	Charles Dickens	Novel	357,000	20 h
1853	Villette	Charlotte Brontë	Novel	195,000	11 h
1861	Great Expectations	Charles Dickens	Novel	184,000	10 h
1908	Anne of Green Gables	L. M. Montgomery	Novel	102,000	6 h
1922	Siddhartha	Hermann Hesse	Novel	42,192	2 h

How this list was made

A novel is listed when its page records Bildungsroman or Coming of age. That rule favours novels that track a single life over years; novels with a child narrator but a different shape, such as Huckleberry Finn, are on the American shelf.

Years are first editions on the book pages. Words and reading times are for the texts here, which means the seven add up to about 1.1 million words.

Questions readers ask

Is Jane Eyre a coming-of-age novel?

Yes, and the clearest one here: five stages of one life, from the red room at Gateshead to Ferndean, each with its own household and its own lesson.

What is the shortest?

Northanger Abbey, at about 77,000 words, though it reads as a parody as much as a formation. The Portrait of the Artist is next.

Do they all end well?

They end with a self, not necessarily a success. Dickens and Austen close on a marriage; Joyce closes on an exile; Brontë closes on a marriage that costs something.

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