1898 C.K. Shorter List of Best 100 NovelsUnpublished

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"He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention." Pride and Prejudice is both a well-proven love object in its own right and one of the most famous accounts ever offered of what love is. With the arrival of eligible young men in their neighbourhood, the lives of Mr. and Mrs....

"Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt!" Throughout the hardships of her childhood - spent with a severe aunt and abusive cousin, and later at the austere Lowood charity school - Jane Eyre clings to a sense of self-worth, despite of her treatment from those close to her. At the age of...

This Norton Critical Edition includes: The first edition of the novel (1847), accompanied by a new preface and revised explanatory footnotes. Key excerpts from Emily Brontë's diary papers and devoirs, along with thirteen of her sister Charlotte Brontë's letters regarding...

The Woman in White is the first and greatest `Sensation Novel'. Walter Hartright's mysterious midnight encounter with the woman in white draws him into a vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue. This new critical edition is the first to use the manuscript of the novel. John...

The best-selling student edition on the market, now available in a Second Edition. Almost two centuries after its publication, Frankenstein remains an indisputably classic text and Mary Shelley's finest work. This extensively revised Norton Critical Edition includes new texts 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...

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...

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. "Contexts" helps the...

Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and his precious hoard of money. But when his money is stolen and an orphaned child finds her way into his house, Silas is given the...

Tom Jones is rightly regarded as Fielding's greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. This carefully modernized edition is based on Fielding's emended fourth edition text and offers the most thorough notes, maps, and bibliography. The introduction uses the latest...

'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 Walpole...

A best-seller in its day and a potent influence on Walpole, Poe, and other writers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic horror, The Mysteries of Udolpho remains one of the most important works in the history of European fiction. After Emily St. Aubuert is imprisoned by her evil guardian,...

Specially commissioned for the World's Classics, this translation includes a full editorial apparatus.

'Mr Slope flattered himself that he could out-manoeuvre the lady...he did not doubt of ultimate triumph.'Barchester Towers (1857) was the book that made Trollope's reputation and it remains his most popular and enjoyable novel. The arrival of a new bishop in Barchester, accompanied by his formidable...

Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented from marrying by the petty tyrant Don Rodrigo, who desires Lucia for himself. Forced to flee, they are then cruelly separated, and must face many dangers...

Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the...

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...

'I think I must be an improper woman without knowing it, I do so manage to shock people.'Elizabeth Gaskell's second novel challenged contemporary social attitudes by taking as its heroine a fallen woman. Ruth Hilton is an orphan and an overworked seamstress, an innocent preyed upon by a weak,...

'What then is to be done? said Rasselas; the more we inquire, the less we can resolve.' Rasselas and his companions escape the pleasures of the 'happy valley' in order to make their 'choice of life'. By witnessing the miseries and misfortunes of others they may come to understand the nature of...

One of the classics of English children's literature, and one of the earliest books written specifically for boys, this novel's steady popularity has given it an influence well beyond the upper middle-class world that it describes. It tells a story central to an understanding of Victorian life, but...

An epic story of lust, cruelty, and sensuality, this historical novel is set in Carthage in the days following the First Punic War with Rome.

In his ever-popular romance of Tudor England, Scott brilliantly recreates all the passion, brutality, verve and vitality of the Elizabethan world. Only two of his novels end tragically - Kenilworth ends with the death of Amy Robsart, who unwisely loved Queen Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of...

'Though I have been dead these fifteen years, I still command here, and none can enter these gates without my permission.'When Sir Philip Harclay returns to England after a long absence, he finds that his childhood friend, Arthur,Lord Lovel, is no longer alive, and that the castle and estates of the...

'Woe to the rash mortal who seeks to know that of which he should remain ignorant; and to undertake that which surpasseth his power!'The Caliph Vathek is dissolute and debauched, and hungry for knowledge. When the mysterious Giaour offers him boundless treasure and unrivalled power he is willing to...

`Look at her, she is the image of our beautiful Italy.' Corinne, or Italy (1807) is both the story of a love affair between Oswald, Lord Nelvil and a beautiful poetess, and an homage to the landscape, literature and art of Italy. On arriving in Italy, Oswald immediately falls under Corinne's magical...

He appears to be persecutor and I the persecuted: is not this difference the mere creature of the imagination?'Young Caleb is a guileless servant who enters the employment of the charismatic Ferdinando Falkland. Falkland, an apparently cosmopolitan and benevolent country squire, is subject to...

'The only English utopia since More's that deserves to be remembered as literature.'News from Nowhere (1890) is the best-known prose work of William Morris. The novel describes the encounter between a visitor from the nineteenth century, William Guest, and a decentralized and humane socialist future...

Tobias Smollett, in the preface to his first novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), acknowledges the influence of Alain René Le Sage's L'Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715-35 in four volumes) on his work. By far the most successful of "useful and entertaining"...

A scholarly edition of The Holy War by Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Roderick Random (1748), Smollett's first novel, is full of the dazzling vitality characteristics of all his work, as well as of his own life. Roderick is the boisterous and unprincipled hero who answers life's many misfortunes with a sledgehammer. Left penniless, he leaves his native Scotland for...

Lord Clonbrony and his ambitious, worldy wife lead an extravagant social life in London on the proceeds of their estates in Ireland. Their son, Lord Colambre, refusing to marry the heiress arranged for him by his mother, decides instead to investigate, incognito, the management of the family estates...

The coming-of-age story of a naive but intelligent and courageous midshipman during the Age of Sail.

Sybil, or The Two Nations is one of the finest novels to depict the social problems of class-ridden Victorian England. The book's publication in 1845 created a sensation, for its immediacy and readability brought the plight of the working classes sharply to the attention of the reading public. The...

Oscar Wilde wrote of this novel, "Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make Reuben Sachs, in some sort, a classic." Reuben Sachs, the story of an extended Anglo-Jewish family in London, focuses on the...