Prepare to be shocked. This novel, written in 1796, is a Gothic festival of sex, magic and ghastly, ghostly violence rarely seen in literature. The Monk is remarkably modern in style and tells a br...
Bleak House is one of Dickens' finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a brilliant comic writer. It is at once a complex mystery story that ful...
Set in 1482, Victor Hugo's powerful novel of 'imagination, caprice and fantasy' is a meditation on love, fate, architecture and politics, as well as a compelling recreation of the medieval world at...
'What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth' So wrote the Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) in 1817. This collection contains all of his poetry: the early work, which is often undervalu...
Young women who have no economic or political power must attend to the serious business of contriving material security'. Jane Austen's sardonic humour lays bare the stratagems, the hypocrisy and t...
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...
Shakespeare's sonnets have an intensity of both feeling and meaning unmatched in English sonnet form. They divide into two parts; the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a fair youth for whom the po...
Traumatised by ghost stories in her youth, Pulitzer Prize winning author Edith Wharton (1862 -1937) channelled her fear and obsession into creating a series of spine-tingling tales filled with spir...
Wilde, glamorous and notorious, more famous as a playwright or prisoner than as a poet, invites readers of his verse to meet an unknown and intimate figure. The poetry of his formative years includ...
The beautiful Scheherazade's royal husband threatens to kill her, so each night she diverts him by weaving wonderful tales of fantastic adventure, leaving each story unfinished so that he spares he...
Anna Sewell's Black Beauty was an immediate success on its publication in 1877, and has gone on to sell an estimated 50 million copies. Black Beauty is a horse with a fine black coat, a white foot ...
This edition of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) includes all the poems contained in the Definitive Edition of 1940. In his lifetime, Kipling was widely regarded as the unofficial Poet Lau...
The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare's Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a ca...
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...
‘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 father of science fiction, Jules Verne, invites you to join the intrepid and eccentric Professor Liedenbrock and his companions on a thrilling and dramatic expedition as they travel down a secr...
With an Introduction and Notes by Sara Haslam, Department of English, The Open University.The Good Soldier is a masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction, an inspiration for many later, ...
A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens’ greatest historical novel, traces the private lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Terror. Dickens base...
The Wordsworth Classics’ Shakespeare Series, with Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and The Merchant of Venice as its inaugural volumes, presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare’...
Cavalier and Roundhead battle it out in the turbulent setting of the English Civil war and provide the background for this classic tale of four orphans as they face adversity, survival in the fores...