The most extensive collection of its kind available in fully-searchable, digital form, Nineteenth-Century Fiction not only represents the great achievements of Victorian fiction but also features the landmarks of Gothic, Jacobean, and other fiction of the Romantic period.

The collection includes a large number of classic novels, from Mansfield Park to The Moonstone, and from David Copperfield to Dracula. All major novelists are represented, including Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Eliot, Gaskell, Thackeray, Trollope, and Scott. Alongside the classic fiction of the period are many examples of hugely popular but critically neglected novels of the day.

From the period 1786 to 1837, the database includes works by Mary Shelley, Frances Burney, Matthew ('Monk') Lewis, Maria Edgeworth, William Godwin, James Hogg, Charles Maturin, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others. Each text is reproduced in full, including all prefatory matter and annotation by the original author.

On the Web, the database forms part of Literature Online, which contains works of prose fiction from 1500 onward. Nineteenth-Century Fiction perfectly complements other major components. In particular, it continues the representation of the rise of the novel from the point at which Eighteenth-Century Fiction breaks off. In the context of Literature Online, students and researchers can, for the first time, explore more than 500 works written over 400 years beginning with the anonymous Virgilius (1518) and ending with such classics as The Time Machine (1895) and Dracula (1892).