The Editors of Romanticism.xyz. Last reviewed: 13 June 2026.

Famous Romantic Novels: The Greatest Works of the Romantic Novel

The Romantic novel — produced across Europe and America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — includes some of the most beloved and most influential works in the Western literary tradition. This page offers a curated list of the most important Romantic novels, with brief descriptions, key themes, and links to more detailed discussions elsewhere on this site.

The Major Romantic Novels

In Britain

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) — the great Radcliffean Gothic novel, with its persecuted heroine, its mysterious villain, its ruined castle, and its “supernatural explained away” ending. A major influence on Jane Austen and on the entire Gothic tradition.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) — the founding text of science fiction, a great Gothic novel, and a major work of Romantic literature. The story of the scientist Victor Frankenstein, the creature he creates and then abandons, and the tragic consequences that follow, is one of the supreme works of the Romantic period. The page on The Gothic Novel treats the work in more detail.
Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (1814) — the founding text of the historical novel, the first of the great Waverley novels that established Scott as one of the most popular writers of the nineteenth century.
Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Ivanhoe (1819) — major works of the historical novel in the Romantic mode.
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1817) — the great English novels of manners, often classed with the Romantics, sometimes against them, and among the supreme achievements of English fiction.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847) — the great Romantic novel of passion, the supernatural, and the wild Yorkshire moors, a major work of the dark Romantic tradition.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) — the great Romantic novel of the orphaned heroine, the Byronic hero, the dark house, and the difficult struggle for independence and recognition.
Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) — a great late Romantic Gothic novel.

In France

Chateaubriand, Atala (1801), René (1802) — the founding works of French Romantic prose, with their melancholy, their exotic settings, and their brooding heroes.
Madame de Staël, Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807) — the great Romantic novel of the woman of genius, set in Italy.
Stendhal, The Red and the Black (1830) — the great French Romantic novel of the ambitious young provincial in the Restoration period; a major work of the modern psychological novel.
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) — Stendhal’s late masterpiece, a great Romantic novel of Italian politics and individual passion.
Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) — the great Romantic novel of medieval Paris, the cathedral, and the outcast.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862) — the great late Romantic novel of social justice, redemption, and the French Revolution and its aftermath.
Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (1844), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–46) — the great Romantic adventure novels.
George Sand, Indiana (1832), Lélia (1833), Mauprat (1837) — the major Romantic novels of George Sand, with their themes of women’s independence and the struggle against social convention.

In Germany

Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) — the great proto-Romantic novel of sensitive youth, unfulfilled love, and despair, a founding text of Romanticism.
Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96) — the great Romantic novel of the artist’s education, a major work of the Bildungsroman tradition.
Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802, unfinished) — the great Romantic novel of the poet’s education, set in a medieval German world of dream, myth, and symbolic experience.
E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Devil’s Elixirs (1815–16) — a major Romantic novel of doubles, mesmerism, religious obsession, and the supernatural.
Jean Paul (Friedrich Richter), Titan (1800–03) — a major late Romantic novel of artistic ambition and German intellectual life.

In Russia

Alexander Pushkin, The Captain’s Daughter (1836) — the great Russian historical novel of the Pugachev rebellion, in the Romantic mode.
Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (1840) — the great Russian Romantic novel of the “superfluous man,” a major work of psychological and social criticism.
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842) — a transitional work between Romanticism and Realism, with its picaresque protagonist, its Russian provincial life, and its strange, dark, and comic vision.

In America

Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798), Edgar Huntly (1799) — the first major American novels, with their themes of sleepwalking, mesmerism, double identity, and frontier violence.
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826) — the great American frontier novel, a major work of American Romanticism.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850) — the great American Romantic novel of Puritan New England, sin, and redemption.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) — the great American Romantic epic of the whaling voyage, the obsessed captain, and the metaphysical reaches of the human struggle with the natural world.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855, expanded through 1892) — the great American Romantic epic of the self, the body, the landscape, and the democratic ideal, written in free verse.

How to Read the Romantic Novels

The Romantic novels reward a kind of reading that is at once sympathetic and critical. They are often long, digressive, and complex in their structure; they mix poetry, philosophy, history, and personal confession; they are full of striking images, set pieces, and emotional climaxes. The best way to begin is to choose a novel that interests you, read it with attention, and then explore the related works and the secondary literature.