Wuthering Heights is the tale of two families both joined and riven by love and hate. Cathy is a beautiful and wilful young woman torn between her soft-hearted husband and Heathcliff, the passionat...
Pip's life as an ordinary country boy is destined to be unexceptional until a chain of mysterious events lead him away from his humble origins and up the social ladder. His efforts to become a Lond...
Emma is young, rich and independent. She has decided not to get married and instead spends her time organising her acquaintances' love affairs. Her plans for the matrimonial success of her new frie...
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...
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...
Guy de Maupassant was a master of the short story. This collection displays his lively diversity, with tales that vary in theme and tone, ranging from tragedy and satire to comedy and farce. In a l...
Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel depicts nothing less than the great clashes between capital and labour, which arose from rapid industrialisation and problems of trade in the mid-nineteenth ce...
With this intensely moving short novel, Edith Wharton set out ‘to draw life as it really was’ in the lonely villages and desolate farms of the harsh New England mountains. Through the e...
Kim is Rudyard Kipling’s finest work. Now controversial, this novel is a memorably vivid evocation of the life and landscapes of India in the late nineteenth century. Kim himself is a resourc...
Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from an asylum in Switzerland. As he becomes embroiled in the frantic amatory and financial intrigues which centre around a cast of brilliantly realised characters ...
Saki (H.H. Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov and O Henry as a master of the short story. His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire, irony and the macabre, in which the stupidit...
The scheming and unscrupulous Lady Susan is unlike any Austen heroine you've met in this fascinating early novella.One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, t...
‘As a man loved a woman, that was how I loved…It was good, good, good…’Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parents – a fencer, a horse rider and a keen s...
The Diary of a Nobody is so unassuming a work that even its author, George Grossmith, seemed unaware that he had produced a masterpiece. For more than a century this wonderfully comic portrayal of ...
Lucia is one of the great comic characters in English literature. Outrageously pretentious, hypocritical and snobbish, Queen Lucia, ‘as by right divine’ rules over the toy kingdom of &l...
This is the first paperback edition to bring out in one volume Kate Chopin’s extraordinary novel The Awakening (1899), along with the complete text of her two collections of short stories, Ba...
In 1915, Lawrence's frank representation of sexuality in The Rainbow caused a furore and the novel was seized by the police and banned almost as soon as it was published. Today it is recognised as ...
Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by John R. Williams. Goethe's Faust is a classic of European literature. Based on the fable of the man who traded his soul for superhuman powers and knowl...
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...
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,...