Books like The Merchant of Venice

If The Merchant of Venice stayed with you, these share its feel: unease, memory and grief. Each comes with a real page, so you can tell in a minute.

About The Merchant of Venice · William Shakespeare

1.Sonnets from the Portuguese

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1850

Also love and grief. A Victorian poet, ill and isolated, writes her way through the terror of being loved by a man who will not look away.

I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,As once Electra her sepulchral urn,And, looking in thine eyes, I overturnThe ashes at thy feet. Behold and seeWhat a great heap of grief lay hid in me,And how the red wild sparkles dimly burnThrough the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scornCould tread them out to darkness utterly,It might be well perhaps. But if insteadThou wait beside me for the wind to blowThe grey dust up—those laurels on thine head,O my Beloved, will not shield thee so,That none of all the fires shall scorch and shredThe hair beneath. Stand further off then! Go.
2.Oedipus Rex

Sophocles, -429

Also memory. A plague-stricken city, a king who promises to find a murderer, and an investigation that keeps turning back on the investigator.

My lot be still to leadThe life of innocence and flyIrreverence in word or deed,To follow still those laws ordained on highWhose birthplace is the bright ethereal sky.No mortal birth they own,Olympus their progenitor alone:Ne’er shall they slumber in oblivion cold,The god in them is strong and grows not old.
3.The Odyssey

Homer, -800

The first great story about a journey home — and every stop along the way is a good reason to give up.

“I spake; Achilles quickly answered me:—‘Noble Ulysses, speak not thus of death,As if thou couldst console me. I would beA laborer on earth, and serve for hireSome man of mean estate, who makes scant cheer,Rather than reign o’er all who have gone downTo death. Speak rather of my noble son,Whether or not he yet has joined the warsTo fight among the foremost of the host.
4.Frankenstein

Mary Shelley, 1818

Also grief. A young scientist makes life and then cannot face what he has made. Told in nested voices, it asks who owes what to whom, and why ambition so often ends in solitude.

“But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.
5.The Importance of Being Earnest

Oscar Wilde, 1895

Two friends invent imaginary relatives to escape their obligations, and their inventions collide in one country house full of people who talk in epigrams.

To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. Who was your father? He was evidently a man of some wealth. Was he born in what the Radical papers call the purple of commerce, or did he rise from the ranks of the aristocracy?
6.A Doll's House

Henrik Ibsen, 1879

Also unease. A wife with a secret loan, a husband who thinks he owns the sunshine, and a home where every kindness is a transaction.

NORA. No, only merry. And you have always been so kind to me. But our home has been nothing but a playroom. I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa’s doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls. I thought it great fun when you played with me, just as they thought it great fun when I played with them. That is what our marriage has been, Torvald.
7.The Portent

George MacDonald, 1864

Also love and unease. A Highland schoolmaster is drawn into the sleepwalking life of a mysterious lady and a legend of a horse with a clanking shoe.
8.Uncle Silas

Sheridan Le Fanu, 1864

Also unease and memory. A nervous heiress is sent to live with her mysterious uncle in a decaying mansion, where charm and menace wear the same face.
9.Lamia

John Keats, 1820

Also love and unease. A serpent becomes a woman, a philosopher refuses to look away, and a feast is conjured out of nothing: Keats's late poem of magic against analysis.
10.The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton, 1920

Also unease and memory. A newly engaged lawyer in 1870s New York finds his tidy future unsettled when his fiancée’s cousin returns from Europe with a freedom he cannot name.
11.The Lily of the Valley

Honoré de Balzac, 1836

Also love and memory. A young man remembers the married woman who taught him desire and restraint in a French valley—and the cost of loving someone who refuses to be possessed.
12.Peter Pan

J. M. Barrie, 1911

Also unease and love. A boy who refuses to grow up flies three children to an island of pirates, fairies and mermaids—and shows how much childhood costs.