1898 C.K. Shorter List of Best 100 NovelsUnpublished

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Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates .Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS'sThe Great American Read Initially published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847, Charlotte Bronte'sJane Eyreerupted onto the English literary scene, immediately winning...

Introduction by Anna Quindlen * Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." So begins Pride and...

Discover the story of The Scarlet Letter with this striking collector's edition from Union Square & Co.'s Signature Editions series! The classic texts that shaped our culture feature exclusive cover art by distinguished artist Malika Favre. Her bold, graphic style gives each classic literature book...

Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, written in 1859, is considered to be among the first mystery novels and one of the finest examples of the sensation novel, a genre blending realism and gothic romance, and exploring the artificiality of identity. In it, a young protagonist, Walter Hartright, meets...

When David Copperfield escapes from the cruelty of his childhood home, he embarks on a journey to adulthood which will lead him through comedy and tragedy, love and heartbreak and friendship and betrayal. Over the course of his adventure, David meets an array of eccentric characters and learns...

  Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and...

It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a...

A panoramic satire of English society during the Napoleonic Wars, Vanity Fair is William Makepeace Thackeray's masterpiece. At its center is one of the most unforgettable characters in nineteenth-century literature: the enthralling Becky Sharp, a charmingly ruthless social climber who is...

"There's nothing kills a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself..."George Eliot's Silas Marner is a 19th-century tale of injustice, betrayal, love and faith. It tells the story of a simple and hard-working weaver who is falsely accused of theft, stigmatized by the local...

Tom Jones (1749) is rightly regarded as Fielding's greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. At the center of one of the most ingenious plots in English fiction stands a hero whose actions were, in 1749, as shocking as they are funny today. This carefully modernized...

Alexandre Dumas's most famous tale-- and possibly the most famous historical novel of all time-- in a handsome hardcover volume. This swashbuckling epic of chivalry, honor, and derring-do, set in France during the 1620s, is richly populated with romantic heroes, unattainable heroines,...

The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity;...

"The first English translation in more than fifty years of Alessandro Manzoni's masterpiece, a work of foundational Italian literature on par with the Divine Comedy and the Decameron."--The Wall Street Journal "An exemplary historical novel" (The New Yorker) from...

Stephen Fry, Jemma Redgrave, Joseph Beattie, and Alex Pettyfer star in director Dave Moore's adaptation of Thomas Hughes' timeless coming of age tale. The time is the mid-1800s, and Tom Brown is a timid student at Rugby Public School. Confronted with relentless bullying, the homesick schoolboy makes...

Ruth is a surprisingly compassionate portrayal of a fallen woman in Victorian times. Ruth Hilton is an young orphaned seamstress who is seduced and then abandoned by gentleman Henry Bellingham. Ruth, pregnant and alone, is taken in by a minister and his sister. They conceal her single status under...

Simply written, funny, and compulsively readable, this fine little book has been heralded as one of the finest examples of English prose and offers a compelling glimpse of Samuel Johnson's moral views. Dashed out over the course of a single week to pay for his mother's funeral, Johnson's only...

From the coral reefs of the Barbados to the jungles and fabled cities of the Orinoco and on to the great sea battle with the Spanish Armada, this vibrant novel captures the daring spirit of Elizabethan adventurers who sailed with Sir Francis Drake.

With his masterwork Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert blazed new trails in literary realism with a gripping tale of a disenchanted wife entangled in an extramarital affair. After that, Flaubert took a completely different tack and dove into the extensive historical research that would form the basis...