The plot is based around the character Beverley who remembers his childhood days with his brother Felix and friends and cousins Felicity, Cecily, Dan, Sara Stanley (the "Story Girl"), hired-boy Peter and neighbor Sara Ray.
Marcel Proust, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Shakespeare, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Kahlil Gibran, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Von Arnim, D. H. Lawrence, Ann Ward Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, C. S. Lewis, George Weedon Grossmith, H.G. Wells, Wilkie Collins, G. K. Chesterton, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, George MacDonald, James Matthew Barrie, Mark Twain, Jack London, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Lewis Wallace, L.M. Montgomery, Homer, Plato, Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Hesse, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Gaston Leroux, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Voltaire, Charles Baudelaire, Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Miguel de Cervantes, Benito Pérez Galdós, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Kalidasa, Valmiki, Laozi, Sun Tzu, Confucius, Cao Xueqin, Princess Der Ling, Inazo Nitobe, Kakuzo Okakura & Soseki Natsume
Jane Austen, C. S. Lewis, H.G. Wells, Herman Melville, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, William Makepeace Thackeray, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Von Arnim, D. H. Lawrence, Ann Ward Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, George Weedon Grossmith, Willkie Collins, G. K. Chesterton, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, George MacDonald, James Matthew Barrie, Mark Twain, Jack London, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Kahlil Gibran, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Lewis Wallace, L.M. Montgomery, Homer, Plato, Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Hesse, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jules Verne, Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Gaston Leroux, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Voltaire, Charles Baudelaire, Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Miguel de Cervantes, Benito Pérez Galdós, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Kalidasa, Valmiki, Laozi, Sun Tzu, Confucius, Cao Xueqin, Princess Der Ling, Inazo Nitobe, Kakuzo Okakura, Soseki Natsume, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Dean Howells, Washington Irving, L. Frank Baum, Theodor Storm, Juan Valera & Rudyard Kipling
