With an Introduction by Mishtooni Bose. More’s Utopia is a complex, innovative and penetrating contribution to political thought, culminating in the famous ’description’ of the Utopians, who live according to the principles of natural law, but are receptive to Christian teachings, who hold all possessions in common, and view gold as worthless. Drawing on the ideas of Plato, St Augustine and Aristotle, Utopia was to prove seminal in its turn, giving rise to the genres of utopi...
Hans Christian Andersen is the best-loved of all tellers of fairy tales. This collection of over forty of Andersen’s most popular stories includes The Mermaid, The Real Princess, The Red Shoes, The Little Match Girl, The Snow Queen, The Tinder Box, The Ugly Duckling and many more. It is delightfully illustrated in black-and white by those remarkable brothers, Charles, Thomas and William Heath Robinson...
With an Introduction and Notes by Hugh Epstein, Secretary of the Joseph Conrad Society of Great Britain. 'Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town...a cruel devourer of the world's light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.' Conrad’s ‘monstrous town’ is London, and his story of espionage and counter-espionage, anarchi...
‘Fifteen men on the dead man's chest-Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!’ Treasure Island is a tale of pirates and villains, maps, treasure and shipwreck, and is perhaps the best adventure story ever written. When young Jim Hawkins finds a packet in Captain Flint's sea chest, he could not know that the map inside it would lead him to unimaginable treasure. Shipping as cabin boy on the Hispaniola, he sails with Squire Trelawney, Captain Smollett, Dr Livesey, the sinister Long John S...
With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue. The Professor is Charlotte Brontës first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and consciousness of a man, William Crimsworth. Like Jane Eyre he is parentless; like Lucy Snowe in Villette he leaves the certainties of England to forge a life in Brussels. But as a man, William has freedom of action, and as a writer Brontë is correspondingly liberated, exploring the relationship between power and sexual desire. Wil...
With an Introduction and Notes by Sally Minogue The Shirley of the title is a woman of independent means; her friend Caroline is not. Both struggle with what a woman's role is and can be. Their male counterparts - Louis, the powerless tutor, and Robert, his cloth-manufacturing brother - also stand at odds to society's expectations. The novel is set in a period of social and political ferment, featuring class disenfranchisement, the drama of Luddite machine-breaking, and the d...
Edgar Poe was born the son of itinerant actors on January 19th, 1809 in Boston, Massachusets. Abandoned by his father and the later death of his mother, he was taken into the foster care of John Allan, a Virginia tobacco farmer. Now styled as Edgar Allan Poe, he distinguished himself at the University of Virginia but was equally adept at collecting debts from his assiduous gambling. His stepfather’s disapproval shattered their fragile relationship and Poe left home to seek hi...
The perfect gift for any Brontë Sisters lover.. Each boxset contains seven books, together creating a comprehensive collection of the Brontë Sisters' best and much-loved works. Beautifully packaged in a rigid, matt-laminated slipcase with metallic detailing, complete with strikingly attractive, bespoke artwork.
Includes: Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Jane Eyre, The Professor, Shirley, Villette, and Wuthering Heights
Othello has long been recognised as one of the most powerful of Shakespeare’s tragedies. This is an intense drama of love, deception, jealousy and destruction. Desdemona’s love for Othello, the Moor, transcends racial prejudice; but the envious Iago conspires to devastate their lives. In its vivid rendering of racism, sexism, contested identities, and the savagery lurking within civilisation, Othello is arguably the most topical and accessible tragedy from Shakespeare’s major...
With an Introduction, explanatory notes, and annotated bibliography by Nicholas Seager. This collection brings together Jane Austen’s earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817. In Sanditon, Austen exercises her acute powers of social observation in the setting of a newly fashionable seaside resort. This edition also includes Lady Susan; The Watsons; Catharine; Love and Freindship [sic} & other wor...
With an Introduction and Notes by Sally Minogue? Dylan Thomas wrote some of the best-known and best-loved poems of the twentieth century, amongst them ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. This edition reproduces the Collected Poems 1934-1952 which the poet authorised just before his tragically early death at the age of 39 and which contains, as he said, ‘most of the poems I have written, and all, u...
Under Milk Wood is Dylan Thomas’s best-known and best-loved work, his radio play completed in 1953 at the very end of his life. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog is his first collection solely of short stories, published in 1940. These two works show us his remarkable creative brilliance at the start and at the end of a highly productive writing life. Thomas described Under Milk Wood variously as ‘a play, an impression for voices, an entertainment out of the darkness’. It...
'Doctor Watson, Mr Sherlock Holmes' - The most famous introduction in the history of crime fiction takes place in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, bringing together Sherlock Holmes, the master of science detection, and John H. Watson, the great detective's faithful chronicler. This novel not only establishes the magic of the Holmes myth but also provides the reader with a dramatic adventure yarn which ranges from the foggy, gas-lit streets of London to the burning...
George Orwell is a difficult author to summarize. He was a would-be revolutionary who went to Eton, a political writer who abhorred dogma, a socialist who thrived on his image as a loner, and a member of the Imperial Indian Police who chronicled the iniquities of imperialism. Both the books in this volume were published in the 1930s, a “a low, dishonest decade,” as his coeval W.H. Auden described it. Orwell’s subjects in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan ...
Mary Lennox was horrid. Selfish and spoilt, she was sent to stay with her hunchback uncle in Yorkshire. She hated it. But when she finds the way into a secret garden and begins to tend to it, a change comes over her and her life. She meets and befriends a local boy, the talented Dickon, and comes across her sickly cousin Colin who had been kept hidden from her. Between them, the three children work astonishing magic in themselves and those around them. The Secret Garden is on...
Frances Burnett Hodgson's novel The Secret Garden is both intriguing and uplifting. It is regarded as one of the best children’s books written in the twentieth century. Mary Lennox, a sickly ten year old girl, adrift in the world after both her mother and father die is sent to Yorkshire to live with an uncle whom she has never met, at his isolated house, Misselthwaite Manor. Initially Mary is seen as a rude, aggressive and selfish child. She dislikes her new home and the peo...
The Jungle Book introduces Mowgli, the human foundling adopted by a family of wolves. It tells of the enmity between him and the tiger Shere Khan, who killed Mowgli's parents, and of the friendship between the man-cub and Bagheera, the black panther, and Baloo, the sleepy brown bear, who instructs Mowgli in the Laws of the Jungle. The Second Jungle Book contains some of the most thrilling of the Mowgli stories. It includes Red Dog, in which Mowgli forms an unlikely alliance w...
Human, All Too Human (1878) marks the point where Nietzsche abandons German romanticism for the French Enlightenment. At a moment of crisis in his life (no longer a friend of Richard Wagner, forced to leave academic life through ill health), he sets out his views in a scintillating and bewildering series of aphorisms which contain the seeds of his later philosophy (e.g. the will to power, the need to transcend conventional Christian morality). The result is one of the corners...
Notes and Introduction by Mark G. Spencer, Brock University, Ontario John Locke (1632-1704) was perhaps the most influential English writer of his time. His Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Two Treatises of Government (1690) weighed heavily on the history of ideas in the eighteenth century, and Locke’s works are often ? rightly ? presented as foundations of the Age of Enlightenment. Both the Essay and the Second Treatise (by far the more influential of the Tw...
Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. In Henry IV, Part 1, the King is in a doubly ironic position. His rebellion against Richard II was successful, but now he himself is beset by rebels, led by the charismatic Harry Hotspur. The King’s son, Prince Hal, seems to be more concerned with the pleasures of the tavern world and the company of the fat rogue, Falstaff, than with concerns of state. Eventually, however, H...
With an Introduction, explanatory notes, and annotated bibliography by Nicholas Seager. This collection brings together Jane Austen’s earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817. Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous wid...
In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a huge cyclone transports the orphan Dorothy and her little dog Toto from Kansas to the Land of Oz, and she fears that she will never see Aunt Em and Uncle Henry ever again. But she meets the Munchkins, and they tell her to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City where the Wonderful Wizard of Oz will grant any wish. On the way, she meets the brainless Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion. The four friends set off to seek the...
‘His body was pressed against the wall at the head of the bed, and the face was a mask of agonised horror and fruitless entreaty. But the eyes were already glazed in death, and before Francis could reach the bed the body had toppled over and lay inert and lifeless. Even as he looked, he heard a limping step go down the passage outside.’ E. F. Benson was a master of the ghost story and now all his rich, imaginative, spine-tingling and beautifully written tales are presented to...
Jules Verne (1828-1905) was internationally famous as the author of novels based on ‘extraordinary voyages.’ His visionary use of new travel technologies inspired his readers to look to the industrial future rather than the remote past for their dreams of adventure. The popularity of his novels led directly to modern science fiction. In From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, Jules Verne turned the ancient fantasy of space flight into a believable technological possib...
With an introduction by Charlotte R. Brown and William Edward Morris. David Hume (1711–1776) was the most important philosopher ever to write in English, as well as a master stylist. This volume contains his major philosophical works. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), published while Hume was still in his twenties, consists of three books on the understanding, the passions, and morals. It applies the experimental method of reasoning to human nature in a revolution that ...
With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Keith Carabine, University of Kent at Canterbury. These three wonderful comic novels drolly record the battle between Lucia and Elisabeth Mapp for social and cultural supremacy in the village of Tilling (based on Rye). Their constant skirmishes ensure that every game of bridge, tea or dinner-party, church service, council meeting or art–exhibition are thrilling encounters that ensure Tilling is always on ‘a very agreeable rack of suspense’...
Editedby Rosemary Gray Here is a book no Christmas stocking should be without, a book that positively distils the spirit of the season. The title poem, familiar to children and adults the world over, introduces a collection of stories and verse with a Christmas theme, guaranteed to engage and amuse readers young and old. Likely to provoke laughter and sometimes to bring a sentimental tear to the driest eye, this festive treasure trove is ideal for reading aloud or curling up ...
When fifteen-year-old orphan John Trenchard is banished by his Aunt Jane, he goes to live at the local inn with the mysterious Elzevir Block, whose son has been killed by Customs Officers. Unofficially adopted by Block, John comes to learn the reasons for the noises in the graveyard at night, of 'Blackbeard' Mohune's lost treasure and Elzevir Block's secret. This dashing tale of eighteenth-century Dorset smugglers will be enjoyed by all who love stories of derring-do written ...
With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies. 'In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked fearful self, so like me my soul seemed to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude of body it belonged'. Elizabeth Gaskell is better known today for her pioneering social novels such as Mary Barton (1848) but she also wrote some fascinating tales of the supernatural and the macabre, which are collected here in this volume. The real char...
With an introduction by Dr. Laurence Marlow. A spectre is haunting Europe (and the world). Not, in the twenty-first century, the spectre of communism, but the spectre of capitalism. Marx's prediction that the state would wither away of its own accord has proved inaccurate, and he did not foresee the tyrannies which have ruled large parts of the globe in his name. Indeed, he would have been appalled if he had witnessed them. But his analysis of the evils and dangers of raw cap...
With an Introduction and Notes by Scott Brewster, University of Central Lancashire. Wilkie Collins is a master of mystery, and The Woman in White is his first excursion into the genre. When the hero, Walter Hartright, on a moonlit night in north London, encounters a solitary, terrified and beautiful woman dressed in white, he feels impelled to solve the mystery of her distress. The intricate plot is peopled with a finely characterised cast, from the peevish invalid Mr Fairlie...
With an Introduction by Rosemary O'Day. London Labour and the London Poor is a masterpiece of personal inquiry and social observation. It is the classic account of life below the margins in the greatest Metropolis in the world and a compelling portrait of the habits, tastes, amusements, appearance, speech, humour, earnings and opinions of the labouring poor at the time of the Great Exhibition. In scope, depth and detail it remains unrivalled. Mayhew takes us into the abyss, i...
‘… the shadow turned round; and I saw a terrible death’s-head, which darted a look at me from a pair of scorching eyes. I felt as if I were face to face with Satan…’ Erik, the Phantom of the Paris Opera House, is one of the great icons of horror literature. This tormented and disfigured creature has made his home in the labyrinthine cellars of this opulent building where he can indulge in his great passion for music, which is a substitute for the love and emotion denied him ...
M.R. James is probably the finest ghost-story writer England has ever produced. These tales are not only classics of their genre, but are also superb examples of beautifully-paced understatement, convincing background and chilling terror. As well as the preface, there is a fascinating tail-piece by M.R. James, ‘Stories I Have Tried To Write’, which accompanies these thirty tales. Among them are ‘Casting the Runes’, ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll come to you, My Lad’, ‘The Tractate Mid...
With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Stephen Arkin, San Francisco State University.Katherine Mansfield is widely regarded as a writer who helped create the modern short story. Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888, she came to London in 1903 to attend Queen's College and returned permanently in 1908. her first book of stories, In a German Pension, appeared in 1911, and she went on to write and publish an extraordinary body of work. This edition of The Collected Stori...
Notes and Introduction by David Ellis, University of Kent at Canterbury. With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley's Lover is the novel with which D.H. Lawrence is most often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a world-wide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated edition...
With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Pamela Bickley, The Godolphin and Latymer School, formerly of Royal Holloway, University of London. The Last Man is Mary Shelley's apocalyptic fantasy of the end of human civilisation. Set in the late twenty-first century, the novel unfolds a sombre and pessimistic vision of mankind confronting inevitable destruction. Interwoven with her futuristic theme, Mary Shelley incorporates idealised portraits of Shelley and Byron, yet rejects Roman...
A new version of John Payne's Victorian translation, with an Introduction by Cormac O Cuilleanain. 1348. The Black Death is sweeping through Europe. In Florence, plague has carried off one hundred thousand people. In their Tuscan villas, seven young women and three young men tell tales to recreate the world they have lost, weaving a rich tapestry of comedy, tragedy, ribaldry and farce. Boccaccio's Decameron recasts the storytelling heritage of the ancient and medieval worlds ...
Selected and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent at Canterbury. Late in the eighteenth century authors began to write ‘Gothic’ stories as a way of putting literature back in touch with the irrational, the supernatural and the bizarre, which had been neglected in the ‘Age of Reason’. This superb new collection brings together stories from the earliest decades of Gothic writing with later 19th and early 20th century tales from the period in ...
Introduction and Notes by Janet Beer, Manchester Metropolitan University. The House of Mirth tells the story of Lily Bart, aged 29, beautiful, impoverished and in need of a rich husband to safeguard her place in the social elite, and to support her expensive habits - her clothes, her charities and her gambling. Unwilling to marry without both love and money, Lily becomes vulnerable to the kind of gossip and slander which attach to a girl who has been on the marriage market fo...
With a new Introduction by Professor Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D. The Forsyte Saga is Galsworthy’s enduringly popular masterpiece. Initially, the plot centres on Soames Forsyte, a successful solicitor living in London with his beautiful wife, Irene. A pillar of the late-Victorian upper middle class, wealthy and well-connected, he seems to lead an enviable life. But beneath the respectable exterior lie acute tensions and frustrations. The marriage of Soames and Irene culminates i...
Introduction and Notes by Ian F.A. Bell, Professor of English Literature, University of Keele. Washington Square marks the culmination of James's apprentice period as a novelist. With sharply focused attention upon just four principal characters, James provides an acute analysis of middle-class manners and behaviour in the New York of the 1870's, a period of great change in the life of the city. This change is explored through the device of setting the novel's action during t...
Translated by Antony M. Ludovici. With an Introduction by Ray Furness. The three works in this collection, all dating from Nietzsche's last lucid months, show him at his most stimulating and controversial: the portentous utterances of the prophet (together with the ill-defined figure of the Übermensch) are forsaken, as wit, exuberance and dazzling insights predominate, forcing the reader to face unpalatable insights and to rethink every commonly accepted 'truth'. Thinking wit...
Illustrated by John D. Batten. Stories selected by Jennifer Chandler, The Folklore Society. The captivating Irish stories collected in this new edition include both comic tales such as Paddy O'Kelly and the Weasel, and tales of heroes from ancient literature such as How Cormac Mac Art went to Faery. By turns funny, fantastical and mysterious, the stories are matched in liveliness by the original illustrations of John D. Batten. It would be hard to find a better introduction f...
Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. The Wordsworth Classics’ Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare’s works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal. The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies, but it remains deeply controversial. The text may seem anti-Semitic; yet repeate...
William Blake was an engraver, painter and visionary mystic as well as one of the most revolutionary of the Romantic poets. His writing attracted the astonished admiration of authors as diverse as Wordsworth, Ruskin, W.B.Yeats, and more recently beat poet Allen Ginsberg and the 'flower power' generation. He is one of England's most original artists whose works aim to liberate imaginative energies and subvert 'the mind-forged manacles' of restriction. This volume contains man...
Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series, with Henry V as its inaugral volume, presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing endeavours to take account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal. Henry V is the most famous and influential of Shakespeare's history plays. Its powerful patriotic r...
Editedand with an Introduction and Notes by Dr Keith Carabine. University of Kent at Canterbury. Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most popular, influential and controversial book written by an American. Stowe's rich, panoramic novel passionately dramatises why the whole of America is implicated in and responsible for the sin of slavery, and resoundingly concludes that only ‘repentance, justice and mercy’ will prevent the onset of ‘the wrath of Almighty God!’. The novel gave such a te...
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1788, is the undisputed masterpiece of English historical writing which can only perish with the language itself. Its length alone is a measure of its monumental quality: seventy-one chapters, of which twenty-eight appear in full in this edition. With style, learning and wit, Gibbon takes the reader through the history of Europe from the second century AD to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 - an enthr...
The story of Edmund Dantes, self-styled Count of Monte Cristo, is told with consummate skill. The victim of a miscarriage of justice, Dantes is fired by a desire for retribution and empowered by a stroke of providence. In his campaign of vengeance, he becomes an anonymous agent of fate. The sensational narrative of intrigue, betrayal, escape, and triumphant revenge moves at a cracking pace. Dumas' novel presents a powerful conflict between good and evil embodied in an epic sa...
Translated by J.J. Graham, revised by F.N. Maude Abridged and with an Introduction by Louise Willmot. On War is perhaps the greatest book ever written about war. Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian soldier, had witnessed at first hand the immense destructive power of the French Revolutionary armies which swept across Europe between 1792 and 1815. His response was to write a comprehensive text covering every aspect of warfare. On War is both a philosophical and practical work in...
With an Introduction by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury 'Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your immediate feelings...' Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot's first full-length novel, marked the emergence of an artist to rank with Scott and Dickens. Set in the English Midlands of farmers and village craftsmen at the turn of the eight...
With an Introduction by David Amigoni. Charles Darwin's travels around the world as an independent naturalist on HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836 impressed upon him a sense of the natural world's beauty and sublimity which language could barely capture. Words, he said, were inadequate to convey to those who have not visited the inter-tropical regions, the sensation of delight which the mind experiences'. Yet in a travel journal which takes the reader from the coasts and inter...
Dating from around 300BC, Tao Te Ching is the first great classic of the Chinese school of philosophy called Taoism. Within its pages is summed up a complete view of the cosmos and how human beings should respond to it. A profound mystical insight into the nature of things forms the basis for a humane morality and vision of political utopia. The ideas in this work constitute one of the main shaping forces behind Chinese spirituality, art and science, so much so that no under...
Translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. Edited with an Introduction by Enrique Chavez-Arvizo. Rene Descartes (1569-1650), the ‘father’ of modern philosophy, is without doubt one of the greatest thinkers in history: his genius lies at the core of our contemporary intellectual identity. Breaking with the conventions of his own time and suffering persecution by the Church as a consequence, Descartes in his writings - most of which are philosophical classics - attempt...
With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Preston, University of Nottingham.With Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz).Little Dorrit is a classic tale of imprisonment, both literal and metaphorical, while Dickens' working title for the novel, Nobody's Fault, highlights its concern with personal responsibility in private and public life. Dickens' childhood experiences inform the vivid scenes in Marshalsea debtor's prison, while his adult perceptions of governmental failures s...
Translated with Notes by George Rawlinson. With an Introduction by Tom Griffith.Herodotus (c480-c425) is 'The Father of History' and his Histories are the first piece of Western historical writing. They are also the most entertaining. Why did Pheidippides run the 26 miles and 385 yards (or 42.195 kilometres) from Marathon to Athens? And what did he do when he got there? Was the Battle of Salamis fought between sausage-sellers? Which is the oldest language in the world? Why di...
Introduction and Notes by Dr Claire Seymour, University of Kent at Canterbury.The proverbial phrase 'life's little ironies' was coined by Hardy for his third volume of short stories. These tales and sketches possess all the power of his novels: the wealth of description, the realistic portrayal of the quaint lore of Wessex, the 'Chaucerian' humour and characterisation, the shrewd and critical psychology, the poignant estimate of human nature and the brooding sense of wonder a...
With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Carole Jones, freelance writer and researcher. George Eliot's final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), follows the intertwining lives of the beautiful but spoiled and selfish Gwendolene Harleth and the selfless yet alienated Daniel Deronda, as they search for personal and vocational fulfilment and sympathetic relationship. Set largely in the degenerate English aristocratic society of the 1860s, Daniel Deronda charts their search for meaningful ...
With an Introduction and Notes by Phillip Mallett, Senior Lecturer in English, University of St Andrews. Educated beyond her station, Grace Melbury returns to the woodland village of little Hintock and cannot marry her intended, Giles Winterborne. Her alternative choice proves disastrous, and in a moving tale that has vibrant characters, many humorous moments and genuine pathos coupled with tragic irony, Hardy eschews a happy ending. With characteristic derision, he exposes t...
An immediate best-seller on publication, Ben Hur remains a dazzling achievement by any standards. A thoroughly exhilarating tale of betrayal, revenge and salvation, it is the only novel that ranks with Uncle Tom's Cabin as a genuine American folk possession. This was the book that finally overcame the inherent suspicion of fiction that still prevailed in much of america in the late nineteenth century. Wallace writes with a freshness and immediacy that brings every action-pac...
Anna Karenina is one of the most loved and memorable heroines of literature. Her overwhelming charm dominates a novel of unparalleled richness and density. Tolstoy considered this book to be his first real attempt at a novel form, and it addresses the very nature of society at all levels of destiny, death, human relationships and the irreconcilable contradictions of existence. It ends tragically, and there is much that evokes despair, yet set beside this is an abounding joy ...
Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. In the hope of saving her brother's life, should a woman submit to rape? Should the law be respected when its administrator is corrupt? How powerful in the state should religion become? Although Measure for Measure ends like a comedy, with reconciliations, forgiveness and marriages, it has often been regarded as one of Shakespeare's problem plays. The drama show...
With a new Introduction by Professor Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D.This selection of a hundred of O. Henry’s succinct tales displays the range, humour and humanity of a perennially popular short-story writer.Here Henry gives a richly colourful and exuberantly entertaining panorama of social life, ranging from thieves to tycoons, from the streets of New York to the prairies of Texas.These stories are famed for their 'trick endings' or 'twists in the tail': repeatedly the plot twirl...
With an Introduction and Notes by Charles P.C. Pettit. Thomas Hardy's only historical novel, The Trumpet Major is set in Wessex during the Napoleonic Wars. Hardy skilfully immerses us in the life of the day, making us feel the impact of historical events on the immemorial local way of life - the glamour of the coming of George III and his soldiery, fears of the press-gang and invasion, and the effect of distant but momentous events like the Battle of Trafalgar. He interweaves...
With an Introduction and Notes by Katherine McGowran.Christina Rossetti is widely regarded as the most considerable woman poet in England before the twentieth century. No reading of nineteenth century poetry can be complete without attention to this prolific and popular poet. Rosetti's inner life dominates her poetry, exploring loss and unattainable hope. Her divine poems have a freshness and toughness of thought, while many of her love poems are erotic, and as often express ...
With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Claire Seymour, University of Kent at Canterbury. Under the Greenwood Tree is Hardy's most bright, confident and optimistic novel. This delightful portrayal of a picturesque rural society, tinged with gentle humour and quiet irony, established Hardy as a writer. However, the novel is not merely a charming rural idyll. The double-plot, in which the love story of Dick Dewey and Fancy Day is inter-related with a tragic chapter in the history ...
Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb was written to be an 'introduction to the study of Shakespeare', but are much more entertaining than that. All of Shakespeare's best-loved plays, comic and tragic, are retold in a clear and robust style, and their literary quality has made them popular and sought-after ever since their first publication in 1807. This edition contains the delightful pen-and-ink drawings of Arthur Rackham.
With an Introduction by Tim Cook. Shakespeare's sonnets have an intensity of both feeling and meaning unmatched in English sonnet form. They divide into two parts; the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a fair youth for whom the poet has an obsessive love and the second chronicles his love for the notorious 'Dark Lady'. In addition to the sonnets, this volume includes Shakespeare's two lengthy narrative poems on classical themes, The Rape of Lucrece which looks forward to the...
Selected by Rosemary Gray. Poignant, wry, chilling, challenging, amusing, thought-provoking and always intriguing, these accomplished tales from the pens of great writers are object-lessons in the art of creating a literary masterpiece on a small canvas. From the straightforwardly anecdotal to the more analytical of human behaviour, all are guaranteed to capture the imagination, stir the emotions, linger in the memory and whet the reader's appetite for more. In this book, Wor...
When the Cuthberts send to an orphanage for a boy to help them at Green Gables, their farm in Canada, they are astonished when a talkative little girl steps off the train. Anne, red-headed, pugnacious and incurably romantic, causes chaos at Green Gables and in the village, but her wit and good nature deligh the fictional community of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and ensure that Anne of Green Gables continues to be a firm favourite with readers worldwide. Anne of Avonlea con...
Motherless Sara Crewe was sent home from India to school at Miss Minchin's. Her father was immensely rich and she became "show pupil" - a little princess. Then her father dies and his wealth disappears, and Sara has to learn to cope with her changed circumstances.
Her strong character enables her to fight successfully against her new-found poverty and the scorn of her fellows.
