In these 'scientific romances' H. G. Wells sees the present reflected in the future and the future in the present. His aim is to provoke rather than predict. The Sleeper falls into a trance, waking...
'I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot', Virginia Woolf stated of her eighth novel, The Waves. Widely regarded as one of her greatest and most original works, it conveys the rhythms of life in...
The Winter's Tale, one of Shakespeare's later romantic comedies, offers a striking and challenging mixture of tragic and violent events, lyrical love-speeches, farcical comedy, pastoral song and da...
Although Tennyson (1809-1892) has often seemed to personify the Victorian Age, he was a poet before it began and his poems endure to speak clearly to this modern one. His mastery of a great variety...
Lively and mischievous, idle and brave, Tom Brown is both the typical boy of his time and the perennial hero celebrated by authors as diverse as Henry Fielding (in Tom Jones) and Alec W...
Treasure Island is the seminal pirates and buried treasure novel, which is so brilliantly concocted that it appeals to readers both young and old. The story is told in the first person by young Jim...
With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex.Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a huge...
The Turn of the Screw is the classic ghost story for which James is most remembered. Set in a country house, it is a chilling tale of the supernatural told by a master of the genre.The ...
Professor Aronnax, his faithful servant, Conseil, and the Canadian harpooner, Ned Land, begin an extremely hazardous voyage to rid the seas of a little-known and terrifying sea monster. However, th...
A year after the publication of The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas produced a sequel worthy in every respect of the original. In Twenty Years After the much beloved D'Artaganan, Athos, Porthos a...
Complete and unabridged, this title comes with a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece, "Ulysses", t...
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 princi...
Gaskell’s last novel, widely considered her masterpiece, follows the fortunes of two families in nineteenth century rural England. At its core are family relationships – father, daught...
In this classically simple tale of the disastrous impact of outside life on a secluded community in Dorset, now in a new edition, Hardy narrates the rivalry for the hand of Grace Melbury between a ...
Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr Earnshaw's death,...