11 Books Like Downton Abbey to Read Next
Nobody does a great house like Downton: the entail, the dollar-princess marriage that saved it, the bells ringing downstairs, and the Dowager Countess delivering one-liners like grenades wrapped in lace. If you have rewatched all six seasons and every film, these eleven books will let you move back in.
Downton Abbey is really three shows braided together — an estate-in-peril drama, an upstairs-downstairs ensemble, and a string of love stories that keep crossing class lines they should not. The books below are sorted the same way. Some are proper romance with guaranteed happy endings; some are family sagas where nothing is guaranteed at all. All of them understand the essential Downton truth: a great house is a machine run on secrets, and the servants always know first.
From Julian Fellowes himself
1. Belgravia — Julian Fellowes
The show's creator wrote a novel, and it is exactly what you hope: a secret from the night before Waterloo detonates decades later among the new-money families of 1840s Belgravia. Scheming heirs, loyal and disloyal servants, and reveals timed like a mid-season cliffhanger. It later became a series, but the book came first.
Heiresses and great estates
2. The American Heiress — Daisy Goodwin
An American heiress marries an English duke and discovers that the title comes with a cold house, colder in-laws, and rules nobody will explain to her. If you always wanted a whole novel about young Cora Levinson's arrival at Downton, this is the closest thing in print.
3. The Heiress Gets a Duke — Harper St. George
The Gilded Age Heiresses series is the romance-novel version of the transatlantic marriage trade: American railroad money meets cash-poor English titles, and sparks fly over the negotiating table. August Crenshaw would rather run the family business than marry a duke — which is exactly why she ends up with one.
4. Cold-Hearted Rake — Lisa Kleypas
Devon Ravenel inherits an earldom he never wanted: a crumbling estate, an army of dependents, and his late cousin's inconvenient widow. The whole first act is pure Downton — death duties, tenant farms, whether to sell or save the house — welded to one of Kleypas' most crackling romances.
5. Caught in the Viscount's Bed — Margot St. James
Framed for murder, apothecary Verity Templeton breaks into grim, isolated Malden Manor to escape a killing frost — and finds the ruthless Viscount Malden slowly dying of a meticulous poison. Their bargain: she unmasks his assassin, he claims her as his own to shield her from the gallows. A whole great house sealed by a blizzard, where someone under the roof is a killer — Downton's Christmas special gone deliciously dark. Part of the ten-book Margot St. James collection. See the full bundle →
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The downstairs stories
6. Longbourn — Jo Baker
Pride and Prejudice, retold from the servants' hall. While the Bennet girls chase Mr. Darcy, housemaid Sarah scrubs their petticoats and falls into a love story of her own. Baker gives the invisible staff of a beloved classic full, aching inner lives — Daisy and Anna would approve.
7. The House at Riverton — Kate Morton
A former housemaid, now ninety-eight, is the last person alive who knows what really happened the night a poet died at a glittering 1924 house party. Morton's debut is soaked in interwar atmosphere and servant's-eye perspective — famously pitched to fans of exactly this show.
8. The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro
Fair warning: this is not a romance, and it will hurt. Ishiguro's Booker winner follows a butler looking back on decades of perfect service — and everything he sacrificed to give it. It is Carson's devotion examined without the show's warmth to soften it, and it is one of the great English novels. Read it when you are feeling sturdy.
Governesses and crossed class lines
9. The Governess Affair — Courtney Milan
A wronged governess parks herself outside a duke's house demanding justice; the duke's fixer is sent to make her leave. Instead, they fall for each other. Milan packs more class tension and quiet fury into this novella than most authors manage in a trilogy — Branson and Sybil energy throughout.
10. The Governess Game — Tessa Dare
A down-on-her-luck governess takes charge of a rake's two impossible wards and, inevitably, the rake himself. Dare plays the upstairs-downstairs romance for comedy without ever cheapening the stakes — the perfect palate cleanser after Ishiguro breaks your heart.
11. The Belle of Belgrave Square — Mimi Matthews
A painfully shy heiress escapes the marriage mart by wedding a battle-scarred soldier with a secret — and moves to his remote Yorkshire estate, where the house itself seems to be hiding something. Matthews writes closed-door Victorian romance with gothic estate atmosphere to spare; her heroines would fit seamlessly at the Downton dinner table.
How to pick your next read
If you want Downton's actual voice, Fellowes' Belgravia is the closest thing to a lost season. If it was the dollar princesses and the estate ledgers, go to Daisy Goodwin for the drama or Harper St. George and Lisa Kleypas for the romance. If you loved the servants' hall most, Longbourn and The House at Riverton hand the story to the people carrying the trays. And if you want a whole houseful of aristocratic scandal in one download, the ten-book Margot St. James collection is less than $1 a book.
Frequently asked questions
Did Julian Fellowes write any novels like Downton Abbey?
Yes — Belgravia, a novel of buried secrets and social climbing in 1840s London that reads like a season of Downton on the page. His earlier satire Snobs skewers the same class machinery in a modern setting.
What romance novels feel like Downton Abbey?
Great-estate and cross-class romances: Lisa Kleypas' Cold-Hearted Rake for the inherited-estate drama, Harper St. George's Gilded Age Heiresses for the dollar-princess marriages, and governess romances like Tessa Dare's The Governess Game for the upstairs-downstairs tension.
Is The Remains of the Day a good pick for Downton fans?
It is the definitive below-stairs novel, but it is quiet, literary, and deliberately heartbreaking rather than romantic. Read it for the Carson-style devotion to a great house — just do not expect a happy ending.