1898 C.K. Shorter List of Best 100 NovelsUnpublished

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Orphaned Jane Eyre grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, where she endures loneliness and cruelty, and at a charity school with a harsh regime. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane's natural independence and spirit - which prove necessary when she finds a position as governess at...

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...

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...

Hester Prynne is a beautiful young woman. She is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbours she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone knows that her little daughter Pearl is the product of an illicit affair but no one knows the identity of Pearl's father. Hester's refusal to name him...

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...

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...

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...

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...

"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,...

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...

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. "Contexts" helps the...

When Silas Marner is wrongly accused of crime and expelled from his community, he vows to turn his back upon the world. He moves to the village of Raveloe, where he remains an outsider and an object of suspicion until an extraordinary sequence of events, including the theft of his gold and...

Fielding's comic masterpiece of 1749 was immediately attacked as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery'. Indeed, his populous novel overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible...

First published in 1844, Alexandre Dumas' adventure The Three Musketeers is one of the most popular novels ever written. Now this rollicking and witty story is available in a new translation by Richard Pevear, award-winning translator of Anna Karenina.

Cooper's most enduringly popular novel combines heroism and romance with powerful criticism of the destruction of nature and tradition. Set against the French and Indian siege of Fort William Henry in 1757,The Last of the Mohicansrecounts the story of two sisters, Cora and...

'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...

Monsieur Goriot is one of a disparate group of lodgers at Mademe Vauquer's dingy Parisian boarding house. At first his wealth inspires respect, but as his circumstances are mysteriously reduced he becomes shunned by those around him, and soon his only remaining visitors are his two beautifully...

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...

Trollope's most popular novel continues the story of Mr. harding and daughter Eleanor.

Rich with wisdom and gentle irony, Oliver Goldsmith's only novel is a charming comedy that tells of an unworldly and generous vicar who lives contentedly with his large family until disaster strikes. When his idyllic life is brutally interrupted by bankruptcy and his daughter's abduction, he lands...

"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...

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...

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...

Set at the time of the Jacobite uprising, The Master of Ballantrae tells of a family divided. James Durie, Master of Ballantrae, abandons his ancestral home to support the Scottish rebellion - leaving his younger brother Henry, who is faithful to the English crown, to inherit the title of Lord...

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...

William Godwin was one of the most popular novelists of the Romantic era; P.B. Shelley praised him, Byron drew heavily on his narrative style, and Mary Shelley, Godwin's daughter, dedicated Frankensteinto him. Caleb Williamsis the riveting account of a young man whose curiosity leads him...

Roderick is combative, often violent, but capable of great affection and generosity. His father had been disinherited and has left Scotland leaving his son penniless. After a brief apprenticeship to a surgeon, the innocent Roderick travels to London where he encounters various rogues.

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...