"Written deliberately to increase the circulation of Dickens's weekly magazine, Household Words, Hard Times was a huge and instantaneous success upon publication in 1854. Yet this novel is not the cheerful celebration of Victorian life one might have expected from the beloved author of The Pickwick Papers and The Old Curiosity Shop. Compressed, stark, allegorical, it is a bitter exposé of capitalist exploitation during the industrial revolution-and...

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by Victor Hugo, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary...

Arthur's seduction of an innocent, young country girl results in remorse, suffering, and regret. According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, "the plot is founded on a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris of the novel, of a confession of child-murder, made to her by a girl in prison." The story's plot follows four characters' rural lives in the fictional community...

The Toilers of the Sea tells of the reclusive Guernsey fisherman Gilliatt, who salvages the engines of a wrecked ship by performing great feats of engineering, matching wits with sea and storm, and doing battle with a great sea monster - all to win the hand of a shipowner's daughter.

Raised in the idyllic setting of Dorlcote Mill, the wild and wilful Maggie Tulliver adores her elder brother Tom and is forever trying to gain the approbation of her parents. Yet, as she grows older and the family struggle under the weight of severe pecuniary difficulties, she becomes increasingly caught between the divergent expectations of the four men in her life: a doting father, an obdurate and vengeful brother, a good-looking and frivolous suitor...

Working-class Jude Fawley longs to be a scholar. But after scheming local girl Arabella Donn traps him in marriage, Jude finds his university dreams drifting away. When his wife abandons him, a window of opportunity opens, and Jude moves to Christminster to work as a stonemason-his eye still on his studies. Then he falls in love with the modern-minded Sue Bridehead, and his descent into scandal, tragedy, and ruin truly begins. Shunned by society and...

The FLAME TREE COLLECTABLE CLASSICS are chosen to create a delightful and timeless home library. Each stunning edition features deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. The unabridged text is accompanied by a Glossary of Victorian and Literary terms produced for the modern reader.Mansfield Park was written just after Pride and Prejudice, offering an opposite view of the world and bringing a very modern perspective...

A new edition of this classic from one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century. Features the definitive Clarendon edition of Villette which is sourced from the earliest printings of Brontes great work. The text is supplemented with a newly commissioned introduction, which gives a thorough and in depth analysis of the context of this fine example of the nineteenth century novel.

The "Woman in White" famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his "charming" friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman...

An immensely popular bestseller upon its publication in 1905, The House of Mirth was Edith Wharton's first great novel. Set among the elegant brownstones of New York City and opulent country houses like gracious Bellomont on the Hudson, the novel creates a satiric portrayal of what Wharton herself called "a society of irresponsib- le pleasure-seekers" with a precision comparable to that of Proust. And her brilliant and complex characterization of...