Martin Chuzzlewit is Charles Dickens' comic masterpiece about which his biographer, Forster, noted that it marked a crucial phase in the author's development as he began to delve deeper into the 's...
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...
Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sa...
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...
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...
The Last Man is Mary Shelley's apocalyptic fantasy of the end of human civilisation. Set in the late twenty-first century, the novel unfolds a sombre and pessimistic vision of mankind confronting i...
'It would not do to be found in the desert under these circumstances: firing wildly into the cactus from a car full of drugs'Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone showcases the evolution o...
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: ...
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...
‘I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it, and of several - I don't know how many - legs and arms or ten...
The House of the Dead is a stark account of Dostoyevsky's own experience of penal servitude in Siberia. In graphic detail he describes the suffering of the convicts - their squalor and degradation,...
Barley Blair is not a Service man: he is a small-time publisher, a self-destructive soul whose only loves are whisky and jazz. But it was Barley who, one drunken night at a dacha in Peredelkino dur...
The hauntingly romantic new weepy from Jojo Moyes, author of bestseller "Me Before You". Set between the First World War and the present, it's the story of two young women, separated by a...
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...
'Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love.'Virginia Woolf's delightful biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett...
The Jungle Book introduces Mowgli, the human foundling adopted by a family of wolves. It tells of the enmity between him and the tiger Shere Khan, who killed Mowgli's parents, and of the friendship...
The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series, with Henry V as its inaugral volume, presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing endeavours to take account of ...
‘… 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…’...
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...
One of the great classics of western literature, Les Misérables is a magisterial work which is rich in both character portrayal and meticulous historical description.Characters s...