A novel of Regency England that centers upon a self-assured young lady who is determined to arrange her life and the lives of those around her into a pattern dictated by her romantic fancy.

In tracing the parish boy's progress, Dickens did not write a topical satire on the workhouse system and the role of the 1834 New Poor Law in fostering criminality, he created a story about the survival of good, and the exploitation of violence.

Classic novella about a captivating young American, Daisy Miller, whose behavior causes conflicting feelings in the mind of would-be suitor, Winterbourne.

Jude Fawley is a young man who longs to better himself and go to Christminster University. However, poverty forces him into a job as a stonemason and an unhappy marriage. When his wife leaves him Jude moves to Christminster determined to follow his dream. There he meets and falls for his free-spirited cousin, Sue Bridehead.

Marlow, the story's narrator, tells his friends of an experience in the British Congo where he once ran a river steamer for a trading company. He tells of the ivory traders' cruel exploitation of the natives there. Chief among these is a greedy and treacherous European named Kurtz, a man who has used savagery to obtain semi-divine power over the natives. While Marlow tries to get Kurtz back down the river, Kurtz tries to justify his actions and motions,...

Called "the first and greatest of English detective novels" by T.S.Eliot, The Moonstone is a masterpiece of suspense. A fabulous yellow diamond becomes the dangerous inheritance of Rachel Verinder. Outside her Yorkshire country house watch the Hindu priests who have waited for many years to reclaim their ancient talisman, looted from the holy city of Somnauth. When the Moonstone disappears the case looks simple, but in mid-Victorian England no one...

The self-interested disregard of a dying woman's bequest, an impulsive girl's attempt to help an impoverished clerk, and the marriage between an idealist and a materialist — all intersect at a Hertfordshire estate called Howards End. The fate of this beloved country home symbolizes the future of England itself in E. M. Forster's exploration of social, economic, and philosophical trends, as exemplified by three families: the Schlegels, symbolizing...

The Morel family, who live on the Nottinghamshire coalfields, are beset with conflict. Gertrude has become disillusioned with her inarticulate working-class husband and devotes her energies to her sons. Son Paul falls in love and seeks to escape his family ties.

When orphaned, ten-year-old Jim Burden arrives in Nebraska to live on his grandparents' farm, he doesn't know what to expect. The Great Plains are so vast that he feels overwhelmed-marooned-blotted out. And what should he make of his new neighbors, the Shimerdas? They don't speak English, and their ways are foreign to him. Yet their fourteen-year-old daughter, Antonia, is pretty, high-spirited-and eager for Jim to teach her English. Will Jim adjust...

"First published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables is one of Hawthorne's defining works, a vivid depiction of American life and values, replete with brilliantly etched characters. The tale of a cursed house with a "mysterious and terrible past" and the generations linked to it, Hawthorne's chronicle of the Maule and Pyncheon families over two centuries reveals, in Mary Oliver's words, "lives caught in the common fire of history.""--BOOK JACKET....