Edgar Poe was born the son of itinerant actors on January 19th, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. Abandoned by his father and the later death of his mother, he was taken into the foster care of John A...
Wilde's works are suffused with his aestheticism, brilliant craftsmanship, legendary wit and, ultimately, his tragic muse. He wrote tender fairy stories for children employing all his grace, artist...
This selection of Kafka’s shorter prose writings includes one of the few works published during his lifetime: the harrowing story of Gregor Samsa’s overnight transformation into a vermi...
"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...
One of the most celebrated and popular historical romances ever written, The Three Musketeers tells the story of the early adventures of the young Gascon gentleman, D'Artagnan and his three friends...
Jane Austen teased readers with the idea of a 'heroine whom no one but myself will much like', but Emma is irresistible. 'Handsome, clever, and rich', Emma is also an 'imaginist', 'on fire with spe...
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...
Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest...
Wilde's only novel, first published in 1890, is a brilliantly designed puzzle, intended to tease conventional minds with its exploration of the myriad interrelationships between art, life, and cons...
With an Introduction, Notes and Bibliography by Dr Bruce Woodcock, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Hull.Shelley's short, prolific life produced some of the most memorable and well-k...
W. B. Yeats was Romantic and Modernist, mystical dreamer and leader of the Irish Literary Revival, Nobel prize winner, dramatist and, above all, poet. He began writing with the intention of putting...
"Jane Eyre" ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an ind...
Begun when the author was only eighteen and conceived from a nightmare, Frankenstein is the deeply disturbing story of a monstrous creation which has terrified and chilled readers since its first p...
Dickens wrote of David Copperfield: 'Of all my books I like this the best'. Millions of readers in almost every language on earth have subsequently come to share the author's own enthusiasm for thi...
With an Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull.Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisiti...
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...
Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied consciousness of Raskolnikov who, against his better instincts,...
"Moby-Dick" is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic. B...
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...
Castigated for offending against public decency, Madame Bovary has rarely failed to cause a storm. For Flaubert's contemporaries, the fascination came from the novelist's meticulous account of prov...