Bleak House Bleak House Bleak House is a novel by English author Charles Dickens, first published as a serial between March 1852 and September 1853. The novel has many characters and several sub-plots, and the story is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. At the centre of "Bleak House" is a long-running legal case, "Jarndyce and Jarndyce", which came about because someone wrote several conflicting wills. Dickens uses this case to satirise the English judicial system. Though the legal profession criticised Dickens' satire as exaggerated, this novel helped support a judicial reform movement, which
The Shooting Party (Chekhov novel) The Shooting Party (Chekhov novel) The Shooting Party (; English: "Drama During a Hunt") is an 1884 novel by Anton Chekhov. It is his longest narrative work, and only full-length novel. Framed as a manuscript given to a publisher, it tells the story of a retailer's daughter in a provincial Russian village who is stabbed to death in the woods during a hunting party, and the efforts to uncover her killer. As the narrator informs, "The Shooting Party" is the name of a manuscript that an unknown author begs a Moscow publisher to read and publish. The narrator agrees at