Basil (1852) is a novel by Wilkie Collins. Written in the aftermath of Antonina (1850), his successful debut, Basil finds the author honing the trademark sense of mystery and psychological unease that would make him a household name around the world. Recognized as an important Victorian novelist and pioneer of detective fiction, Wilkie Collins was a writer with a gift for thoughtful entertainment, stories written for a popular audience that continue...

In this delightful debut, a sweet romance, Politano pens a clever story-within-a-story full of Victorian intrigue and ghosts. Aurelie Harcourt's father has just died, and she is leaving the only home she has ever known, Shepton Mallet debtor's prison, with the few things he left her: a trunk full of blank notebooks and his pen name, Nathaniel Droll. Initially planning to abandon his unfinished serial novel, Lady Jayne Disappears,which she has been...

"Diana Sommerville seems to have it all-beauty, brains, and vast wealth, thanks to her family's ownership of a diamond mine abroad. But when her beloved brother dies in battle and leaves a lion's share of his estate to his best friend, Diana finds herself in a situation that seems scripted for the stage- Sharing her family home with the man she used to love-and now loathes. Worse, her unfaithful former fiance has already moved in . Rupert Lacey didn't...

Honoring an arranged marriage to keep his estate afloat, the new Duke of Gage weds Lady Isabella, a beautiful woman who longs for independence, and discovers that none of his previous exploits were half as pleasurable as wooing his own wife.

"Lucy Merryweather has inherited a fortune--and her great-aunt's list of unfulfilled wishes. What better way to honor her memory than by accomplishing as many of them as possible? And with Lucy's family an ocean away in New York, nothing stands in her way--if one ignores the private investigator hired to spy on her"--

In order to save her family's estate after her husband dies, Virginia Traylor, Countess of Barrett, in desperate need of an heir, tricks the man she once loved, Scottish warrior Macrath Sinclair, into getting her pregnant, but her clever plan quickly unravels when he discovers her deception.

The beautiful Cassandra Sherburn has, everything a young lady, could possibly desire. Slender, flame-haired and alabaster-skinned and the heiress to her father's immense fortune, her father has promised her hand in marriage to the dashing young Marquis of Charlbury, heir to the ancestral home and estates of the Duke of Alchester and she believes that she is in love with him. And, over the years she has collected newspaper cuttings about him and pasted...

"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...

A Christmas wedding to the Duke of Bellingham. Any other socialite in Newport, Rhode Island, would be overjoyed at the prospect, but Elizabeth Cummings finds her mother's announcement as appealing as a prison sentence. Elizabeth has not the slightest desire to meet Randall Blackmore, let alone be bartered for an English title. Her heart belongs to another, and the duke's prestige, arrogance, and rugged charm will make no difference to her plans of...

Surviving on her sparse wages as a seamstress, Prudence Bosworth finally gets the chance to pursue her dreams of love, romance, and adventure when she inherits a fortune from her long-lost father--with the stipulation that she must marry in one year.