Harriet E. Langley – författare

Stories about the thing a life is spent looking for: a knight who follows a legend, a Persian magus who follows a star, a man who finds the blue flower and does not recognize it. Van Dyke was a Princeton professor, a clergyman and Wilson's minister to the Netherlands during the war; he took his title from Novalis, and these 1902 tales are the American Romantic in his best form.

Clara Amedroz has no money and two men: her cousin, who will inherit the estate she grew up in, and a suitable gentleman with a career. Trollope wrote before breakfast, by his watch, 250 words a quarter-hour; he called this novel of 1866 the worst thing he ever did, which is nonsense - it is the one where he looks hardest at what a woman without an income is actually choosing between.

Two elderly bachelors and a household of young women in a Norwood suburb, and a widow next door who bicycles, boxes and holds opinions - after which the neighborhood is never the same. Conan Doyle wrote this in 1892 between the Holmes stories; it is a domestic comedy about the New Woman, affectionate and rather braver than it looks, and nobody remembers he wrote it.

A delicate boy at an English public school forms an attachment to an older pupil that is the whole of his emotional life. Sturgis kept an open house at Windsor where Henry James and Edith Wharton were regulars and did needlework while his guests talked; this quiet novel about a schoolboy's love was published in 1891 and says, without ever saying, what could not then be said.

A body in the Vienna Stadtpark, a lamp that burned out at the wrong hour, and Joseph Muller - small, shabby, apologetic, the best detective in the police, and a man with a conviction of his own in the past. Groner was an Austrian schoolteacher who invented the first professional detective in German fiction; Muller's problem is that he keeps pitying the people he catches.

A student of natural philosophy discovers the secret of life, assembles a creature from the dead, and flees the room the moment it opens its eyes. Everything that follows - the abandonment, the pursuit, the demand for a companion - comes from that flight rather than from the act of creation. Mary Shelley was eighteen when she began it, and the questions she raised have outlived every answer science has offered since.