William Morris 2 hr 37 min read

Golden Walter, fleeing a faithless wife, sails away and is drawn by a vision to a strange enchanted land ruled by a beautiful, sinister Lady, her dwarf, and a captive maid.

William Morris's 1894 novel is widely called the first modern fantasy novel. Lyrical, dreamlike, hugely influential. Read it for the book that launched the whole genre of invented-world fantasy, a haunting quest-romance of enchantment, desire, and escape, told in Morris's beautiful archaic prose, the direct ancestor of Tolkien and all that followed.

In its time

Published in 1894, during the 1890s, wells arrives.

Reading it

2 hr 37 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).