What does persuasion mean - a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most ...
The magical Peter Pan comes to the night nursery of the Darling children, Wendy, John and Michael. He teaches them to fly, then takes them through the sky to Never-Never Land, where they find Red 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…’...
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 po...
When Pollyanna Whittier goes to live with her sour-tempered aunt after her father’s death, things seem bad enough, but then a dreadful accident ensues.However, Pollyanna’s s...
"Pride and Prejudice", which opens with one of the most famous sentences in English Literature, is an ironic novel of manners. In it, the garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has only on...
The Return of the Native is widely recognised as the most representative of Hardy's Wessex novels. He evokes the dismal presence and menacing beauty of Egdon Heath - reaching out to touch the lives...
Richard II is one of Shakespeare’s finest works: lucid, eloquent, and boldly structured. It can be seen as a tragedy, or a historical play, or a political drama, or as one part of a vast dram...
Richard III is one of the finest of Shakespeare’s historical dramas. Although it has a huge cast, Richard himself, gleefully wicked, charismatically Machiavellian, always dominates the play: ...
From its first publication in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has been printed in over 700 editions. It has inspired almost every conceivable kind of imitation and variation, and been the subject of plays, o...
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 care...
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 re...
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...
With an Introduction, Bibliography and Glossary by Dr Paul Wright, Trinity College, Carmarthen.'I mean to show things really as they are, not as they ought to be'. wrote Byron (1788-182...
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 ...
As Angus Calder states in his introduction to this edition, 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War'. Lawrence's younger brother...
Although the shortest of George Eliot's novels, Silas Marner is one of her most admired and loved works. It tells the sad story of the unjustly exiled Silas Marner - a handloom linen weaver of Rave...
`When you have experienced Sons and Lovers you have lived through the agonies of the young Lawrence striving to win free from his old life'.Richard AldingtonThis novel is Lawrence...
A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens’ greatest historical novel, traces the private lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Terror. Dickens base...
Tender is the Night is a story set in the hedonistic high society of Europe during the ‘Roaring Twenties’. A wealthy schizophrenic, Nicole Warren, falls in love with Dick Diver - her ps...