The Man in the Iron Mask is the final episode in the cycle of novels featuring Dumas' celebrated foursome of D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, who first appeared in The Three Musketeers. Some ...
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...
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...
This book is with an introduction and notes by Dr Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading. "To the Lighthouse" is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. It is based on...
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,...
In Henry IV, Part 1, the King is in a doubly ironic position. His rebellion against Richard II was successful, but now he himself is beset by rebels, led by the charismatic Harry Hotspur. The King&...
This is an intense drama of love, deception, jealousy and destruction. Desdemona's love for Othello, the Moor, transcends racial prejudice; but the envious Iago conspires to devastate their lives. ...
Our Mutual Friend, Dickens' last complete novel, gives one of his most comprehensive and penetrating accounts of Victorian society. Its vision of a culture stifled by materialistic values emerges n...
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...
Oscar Wilde took London by storm with his first comedy, Lady Windermere's Fan. The combination of dazzling wit, subtle social criticism, sumptuous settings and the theme of a guilty secret proved a...
Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury.This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment and expiation, ...
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…’...
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...