Dickens had already achieved renown with The Pickwick Papers. With Oliver Twist his reputation was enhanced and strengthened. The novel contains many classic Dickensian themes - grinding poverty, d...więcej »
With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Preston, University of Nottingham. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) and George Cruickshank.The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), with its com...więcej »
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful and sometimes violent novel of expectation, love, oppression, sin, religion and betrayal. It portrays the disintegration of the marriage of Helen Huntingdo...więcej »
Wilde, glamorous and notorious, more famous as a playwright or prisoner than as a poet, invites readers of his verse to meet an unknown and intimate figure. The poetry of his formative years includ...więcej »
Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted envir...więcej »
Agnes Grey is a trenchant expose of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-nineteenth century. This is a ...więcej »
Initially a vivacious, outgoing person, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) progressively withdrew into a reclusive existence. An undiscovered genius during her lifetime, only seven out of her total of 1,7...więcej »
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 pr...więcej »
Transplanted to Europe from her native America, Isabel Archer has candour, beauty, intelligence, an independent spirit and a marked enthusiasm for life. An unexpected inheritance apparently gives h...więcej »
Anton Chekhov is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of short stories. He constructs stories where action and drama are implied rather than described openly, and which leave much to the ...więcej »
Following the success of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby was hailed as a comic triumph and firmly established Dickens as a 'literary gentleman'. It has a full supporting cast of...więcej »
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 wea...więcej »
A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die...'.Darwin's theory of natural selection issued a profound challenge to orthodox thought and belief...więcej »
The two political classics in this book are the product of a time of intense turmoil in Chinese history. Dating from the Period of the Warring States (403-221BC), they anticipate Machiavelli's The ...więcej »
When Father goes away with two strangers one evening, the lives of Roberta, Peter and Phyllis are shattered. They and their mother have to move from their comfortable London home to go and live in ...więcej »
Set in the mid-19th century, and written from the author's first-hand experience, North and South follows the story of the heroine's movement from the tranquil but moribund ways of southern England...więcej »
This book is with an introduction and notes by Dr Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading. "To the Lighthouse" is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. It is based on...więcej »
'There he lay looking as if youth had been half-renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey, the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the ...więcej »
Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results.The diffident and much put-upon he...więcej »
The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare's Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a ca...więcej »