The King of France gives Helena the hand of any man she wants in marriage, but the one she chooses, Bertram, flees to Tuscany, and she must use her wits to get him back. Includes an introduction, notes, and discussion of the theatrical world of Shakespeare.

On her fortieth birthday Madame Wu, a beautiful upper-class Chinese woman, voluntarily retires from married life. It is her plan to select a concubine for her husband and live a freer life as chief arbitrator of the house of Wu. The difficulties which ensue change the lives within this pavilion of women.

Anne Bronte's second novel is a passionate and courageous challenge to the conventions supposedly upheld by Victorian society and reflected in circulating-library fiction. The heroine, Helen Huntingdon, after a short period of initial happiness, leaves her dissolute husband, and must earn her own living to rescue her son from his influence. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is compelling in its imaginative power, the realism and range of its dialogue, and...

Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway-a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the death of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance-infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life-Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally...

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a mesmerizing and unsettling exploration of the female psyche and the stifling constraints of 19th-century society. The story is narrated by a woman suffering from what her husband and physicians diagnose as "nervous depression." She is confined to a room in her home and prescribed a treatment of complete rest. As the protagonist spends her days in isolation, she becomes increasingly obsessed...

Wife and mother Marta Crawford is away on business when she meets the charming Todd Wilson and, much to her dismay, wakes up the next morning in his bed. Filled with remorse and regret, she tells Todd she's made a terrible mistake and flees, hoping to put her reckless behavior behind her. But Todd isn't willing to let go. He worms his way into all corners of her life, befriending her husband and business partner, and seducing her teenage daughter....

By the time you read this, I'll have killed one of your husbands. In an isolated retreat, deep in the Northumbria moors, three women arrive for a weekend getaway. Their husbands will be joining them in the morning. Or so they think. But when they get to Dark Fell Barn, the women find a devastating note that claims one of their husbands has been murdered. Their phones are out of range. There's no internet. They're stranded. And a storm's coming in....

"1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability: pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy. When the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis...

After meeting Susanne Lasko, a desperate, unemployed divorcee, by chance, Nadia Trenkler, a stylish Berlin investment counselor, hires Susanne, whom she closely resembles, to spend the weekend with her husband, with whom she barely interacts, so she can conduct an out-of-town affair. Of course, a lot more is going on than Susanne realizes. For one thing, Marcus Zurkeulen, a shady investor Nadia has been tricking, wants the money she stole from him....

Uncomfortable with the paternalistic dependencies and prudery of New York society, Lucy Carleton, the daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in 1880s New York City and married to the ambitious, nouveau riche William Carlton, yearns to unleash her bohemian soul and escape the confines of her class, gender, and era.