Following the death of her uncle, the orphan Jane Eyre is sent to the Lowood School, where she grows into a confident and well-educated young woman. When Jane leaves Lowood to become a governess at Thornfield Hall, she falls in love with Mr. Rochester, her pupil's guardian. But a series of eerie...

Discover Jane Austen's most beloved classic. When Elizabeth Bennet meets Mr Darcy, she is repelled by his overbearing pride and prejudice towards her family. But the Bennet girls are in need of financial security in the shape of husbands, so when Darcy's...

A classic tale of revenge and redemption, in a beautiful pocket hardback edition.The Scarlet Letter is the story of three New England settlers at odds with the Puritan society in which they live. Roger Chillingworth, an ageing scholar, arrives in New England after two years' separation from...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. 'The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.' One of the...

Dickens's tale of David Copperfield follows him from birth through to his successful career as a novelistIn one of his most energetic and enjoyable novels, Dickens tells the life story of David Copperfield, from his birth in Suffolk, through the various struggles of his childhood, to his successful...

Harriet Beecher Stowe's seminal anti-slavery novel with an afterword by Pat Righelato.When a Kentucky farmer falls on hard times he is forced to sell his slaves, and among them is Uncle Tom, who's bought by a brutal plantation owner. The novel describes the horror of plantation labour and Tom...

Where there is love, there is hope. Accompanying a 6-part series on BBC One from the makers of War and Peace, and starring Dominic West, Lily Collins, David Oyelowo and Olivia Coleman, this edition of Les Miserables also has a...

A flamboyant and controversial personality of enormous wit and intelligence, Voltaire remains one of the most influential figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.Candide,his masterpiece, is a brilliant satire of the theory that our world is “the best of all possible worlds.” The...

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...

The perfect companion to The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, both published in Alma Classics' Evergreens series, Silas Marner portrays a changing society with realism. Having been accused of theft and hounded out of a religious community many years...

The 'Voice of the Year' competition introduced and sponsored by Naxos AudioBooks and The Times books pages, edited by Erica Wagner, took place in Spring 2004. Readers without any formal drama training or professional acting experience were invited to send in recordings of a short extract of either...

With carefully adapted text, new illustrations, language practise activities and additional online resources, the Penguin Readers series introduces language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content. Titles include popular classics, exciting...

Introduction and Notes by David Blair. University of Kent at Canterbury. It is 1757. Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of native Americans for...

One of the most controversial Russian novels ever written, Fathers and Sons dramatizes the volcanic social conflicts that divided Russia just before the revolution, pitting peasants against masters, traditionalists against intellectuals, and fathers against sons. It is also a timeless...

'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...

"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...

Silas Rutvyn is something of a riddle. To some, including his niece, he is something of a ghost. There are, however, no simple answers. As Le Fanu gradually unfolds the layers of this story, we are irresistibly drawn into his world. From the writer of such works as" Through a Glass Darkly, " and...

Caleb Williams is hired as personal secretary to a British Squire, Fernando Falkland. In the course of his work he comes across a terrible secret from the Squire's past, and is sworn to secrecy. Falkland believes in the virtue of the upper classes and the villainy of the lower. He is uneasy in the...

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