1898 C.K. Shorter List of Best 100 NovelsUnpublished

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When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister...

'The masterwork of a great genius' William Makepeace Thackeray A novel of intense emotional power, heightened atmosphere and fierce intelligence, Jane Eyre dazzled and shocked readers with its passionate depiction of a woman's search for equality and freedom on her own...

The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period...

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice,...

Contemporary perspectives of the text are provided in two sections: Contexts helps place the novel in relation to the mind of its creator through writings by Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John William Polidori; Nineteenth-Century Responses collects six reactions to the book...

New footnotes have been added, based on discoveries by the leading Soviet Dostoevsky scholar, Sergei Belov. "Backgrounds and Sources", highly praised in the Second Edition, remains unaltered. Included are a detailed map of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, selections from Dostoevsky's notebooks...

Charles Dickens's most famous novel was also his own favorite, and the one that drew most on his own life story. David Copperfield is the classic account of a boy growing up in a world that is by turns magical, fearful, and grimly realistic. In a book that is part fairy tale and...

The novel that changed the course of American history Published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel was a powerful indictment of slavery in America. Describing the many trials and eventual escape to freedom of the long-suffering, good-hearted slave Uncle Tom, it aimed to show...

"All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds"   It was the indifferent shrug and callous inertia that this "optimism" concealed which so angered Voltaire, who found the "all for the best" approach a patently inadequate response to suffering, to natural disasters,...

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...

No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their...

Este texto, cima de la literatura en lengua castellana, se divide en dos partes que relatan las aventuras de un loco - cuerdo que trata de hacer revivir las mágicas historias de los libros de caballerías. En la primera parte don Alonso Quijano es un humilde hacendado que invierte todo su capital en...

Michael Shinagel has collated the reprint with all six authorized editions published by Taylor in 1719 to achieve a text that is faithful to Defoe's original edition.  Annotations assist the reader with obscure words and idioms, biblical references, and nautical terms.

George Eliot's tale of a solitary miser gradually redeemed by the joy of fatherhood, Silas Marner is edited with an introduction and notes by David Carroll in Penguin Classics. Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered...

"We read The Three Musketeers to experience a sense of romance and for the sheer excitement of the story," reflected Clifton Fadiman. "In these violent pages all is action, intrigue, suspense, surprise--an almost endless chain of duels, murders, love affairs, unmaskings, ambushes, hairbreadth...

A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighbouring squire - though he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. But when his amorous...

The wild rush of action in this classic frontier adventure story has made The Last of the Mohicans the most popular of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Deep in the forests of upper New York State, the brave woodsman Hawkeye (Natty Bumppo) and his loyal Mohican friends...

'Look, my lord!  See heaven itself declares against your impious intentions!'The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential works of Gothic fiction. It inaugurated a literary genre that will be forever associated with the effects that...

Trapped in a gloomy medieval fortress, an orphaned heroine battles the devious schemes of her guardians as well as her own pensive visions and melancholy fancies. Generations of readers have thrilled to this famous Gothic tale from 1794 and its hypnotic pre-Freudian exploration of the psyche.

Turgenev's timeless tale of generational collision, in a sparkling new translation When Arkady Petrovich returns home from college, his father finds his eager, na ve son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend...

Oliver Goldsmith earned instant acclaim when he published The Vicar of Wakefield, a marvelous mixture of burlesque and satire. The simple village vicar, Mr. Primrose, is living with his wife and six children in complete tranquility until unexpected calamities force them to weather one hilarious...

"I never saw anything like you clergymen ... you are always thinking of fighting each other"   After the death of old Dr Grantly, a bitter struggle begins over who will succeed him as Bishop of Barchester. And when the decision is finally made to appoint the evangelical Dr...

"Thefirst 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...

Evelina is the daughter of an English aristocrat, but is brought up in the country until her seventeenth birthday, because she is of dubious birth and unacknowledged. Once out in London and Bristol-Hotwells, Evelina learns through a series of humorous events how to navigate society, and a nobleman...

Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of...

A tragic affair blooms between a working-class orphan and a wealthy rake in this classic novel of Victorian England. Although Ruth Hilton is kind, life does not treat her kindly in return. An orphaned young seamstress, she works long hours at a sweatshop in a small English...

Family secrets and sinister plots abound in this beautifully atmospheric Victorian gothic thriller from a celebrated Irish author. For Maud Ruthyn, life is lonely in a mansion with no family besides her melancholic father. But when Madame de la Rougierre is hired to be her...

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...

Robert Louis Stevenson's classic historical adventure novel 'The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter's Tale' has been enjoyed around the world for over 120 years. The story follows two Scottish noblemen brothers whose family is torn apart by the Jacobite rising of 1745.

In the court of Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, is favoured above all the noblemen of England. It is rumoured that the Queen may chose him for her husband, but Leicester has secretly married the beautiful Amy Robsart. Fearing ruin if this were known, he keeps his lovely young wife a...

A chilling addition to the Haunted Library of Horror Classics. When you have all you could ever want-power, wealth, influence, status-what's left to wish for? First published in 1786, William Beckford's classic tale combines the lush setting of The Arabian Nights with a...

Wilhelm goes through deep self-realisation and decides to escape his empty life of a bourgeois businessman. After a failed romance with the theatre, Wilhelm commits himself to the mysterious Tower Society. A coming-of-age tale, a story of education and disillusionment, a novel of ideas ranging...

Washington Irving (1783-1859) was an American author of the early nineteenth century. Best known for his short stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle, he was also a prolific essayist, biographer and historian. He spoke fluent Spanish, which served him well in his writings on that...

Written in 1845, just 3 years before revolutions swept Europe, The Wandering Jew is a classic French novel that became an international bestseller. Originally serialized in a French newspaper, the novel created an instant controversy with it

Excerpt: "Towards the west end of Grove Street, in Carlingford, on the shabby side of the street, stood a red brick building, presenting a pinched gable terminated by a curious little belfry, not intended for any bell, and looking not unlike a handle to lift up the edifice by to the public...

William Morris is most famous for his textile design, but he was also a passionate and active socialist. News From Nowhere explores his socialist ideals in soft science-fiction. A man returns from a socialist meeting and falls into a sleep from which he wakes in a utopian, socialist future.

For nearly a century, Scribner has exemplified the very best in publishing by pairing classic texts with the illustrative giants of the time, such as N. C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish. With the same commitment to the high standards established by the series' founders, Atheneum Books for Young Readers...

Lord Colambre finds that his mother Lady Clonbrony's attempts to buy her way into the high society of London are only ridiculed, while his father, Lord Clonbrony, is in serious debt as a result of his wife's lifestyle. His mother wishes him to marry an heiress, Miss Broadhurst, who is a friend of...

Susan Ferrier sold more copies of her novels than her contemporary, Jane Austen. Sir Walter Scott declared her his equal. Why, then has she been lost to history? On the 200th anniversary of this sharply observed, comic novel, it is time to rediscover her brilliance. 'Edinburgh is...

Excerpt: "The events which are recorded in the following pages, took place in that part of Southern Germany situated between the mountainous district of the Alb and the Black Forest. That portion of territory is bounded by the former on the north-west, by a long chain of hills of unequal height and...

Born and raised in Scotland, Michael Scott went into the family business as a merchant when he reached adulthood, a role that required frequent sea voyages to Jamaica. Based on his experiences at sea, Scott penned the tale Tom Cringle's Log, one of the earliest nautical-themed novels.

As outspoken in his day as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens are today, American freethinker and author ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL (1833-1899) was a notorious radical whose uncompromising views on religion and slavery (they were bad, in his opinion), women's suffrage (a good idea, he believed),...

A fantastic classic novel set during the events of the Great Plague and Great Fire of London in 1665-1666.

'Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy' - thus Disraeli characterised the state of relations between England's rich and poor as Queen Victoria ascended the throne. in both town and country there was trouble as the new centres of industrial and commercial wealth grew but...

After the death of his father, young Anton Wohlfart begins an apprenticeship in the office of the merchant T. O. Schröter in Breslau. Anton quickly succeeds through honest and diligent work, achieving a proper bourgeois existence. He has a variety of experiences with the Schröter family and also...

Napoleonic wars, bread riots, religious intolerance, industrial revolution....it's all here in the life of this most perfect of heroes. (Excerpt from Goodreads)

In this classic of the supernatural, a physician puzzles over seventeen-year-old Elsie's neurosis and fiery temper--only diagnosing her when he learns that the girl's mother, while pregnant, was bitten by a poisonous snake. Exploring themes of original sin and redemption in the footsteps of...

The Channings is an 1862 novel by the British writer Ellen Wood. A man takes responsibility for a theft he believes his brother has committed. His brother is really innocent of the crime, and the real culprit is later caught.(Excerpt from Wikipedia)