The Countess of Blessington
Confessions of an Elderly Gentleman. Illustrated by six female portraits, from highly finished drawings by E. T. Parris. By the Countess of Blessington. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard. 1836.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Lady Audley's Secret. By M. E. Braddon. In two volumes [bound and scanned as one]. Leipzig, 1862 (the same year as the first London edition). —One of the greatest of all sensation novels, admired and imitated by two generations of famous novelists.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lyttton. —This famous man's name is a moving target; at various times it was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Lytton Bulwer, and Lord Lytton. Because of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest, that form of the name is now most familiar to readers; but many of his works were published under the name Lytton. Since space on the Web is virtually unlimited, we simply repeat his listing under both B and L.

No English writer of the 1800s is less respected in today's popular culture, yet none had so much influence on the culture of his own day. Wagner's opera Rienzi is based on a Lytton novel, but who remembers that now? The Coming Race practically founded the science-fiction genre. The Last Days of Pompeii painted a picture of Roman life in the mind of the public that has never been erased. Charles Dickens took Lytton's artistic advice and revised the ending of Great Expectations.

Reading Lytton candidly, without preconceptions, we might conclude that he is a bit full of himself sometimes, but once he takes hold of his readers he simply doesn't let go.

As for the man himself, the wife whom he tried to keep imprisoned in a madhouse wrote a memoir entitled A Blighted Life; and, having said that, we probably need say nothing more.

There is a street in Pittsburgh named for Lord Lytton, in a part of the Oakland neighborhood laid out in the early 1900s with streets named after great modern writers. Lytton keeps company there with Thackeray, Parkman, Tennyson, and Ruskin.

Here is a complete list of Lytton's novels, which will eventually be filled in with links to each book:

Leila: or The Siege of Granada
Calderon, the Courtier
The Pilgrims of the Rhine
Falkland (1827)

Pelham; or, the Adventures of a Gentleman. In three volumes. London, 1828.
Volume I (second edition).

Volume II.

Volume III.

The Disowned (1829)
Devereux (1829)
Paul Clifford (1830)
Eugene Aram (1832)
Godolphin (1833)
Falkland (1834)
The Last Days of Pompeii (1834)
Rienzi, the last of the Roman tribunes (1835)
The Student (1835)
Ernest Maltravers (1837)
Alice (1838)
Night and Morning (1841)
Zanoni (1842)
The Last of the Barons (1843)
Lucretia (1846)
Harold, the Last of the Saxons (1848)
The Caxtons: A Family Picture (1849)



"My Novel" by Pisistratus Caxton, or Varieties in English Life. In two volumes. London [no date, but a dedication dated "15th Dec., 1852."]
Volume I.

Volume II.

The Haunted and the Haunters or The House and the Brain (1859)
What Will He Do With It? (1858)
A Strange Story (1862)
The Coming Race (1871), republished as Vril: The Power of the Coming Race
Kenelm Chillingly (1873)
The Parisiens (1873, unfinished)