"When her family becomes impoverished after a disastrous financial speculation, Agnes Grey determines to find work as a governess. This is a personal perspective on the desperate position of unmarried, educated women in Victorian society. "Agnes Grey" is undoubtedly a deeply personal novel, in which Anne Bronte views on the 'contemporary' issue of the treatment of governesses, as well as her passionate religious sympathies, find very deliberate expression;...

At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant...

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...

"Lucy is a well-mannered Edwardian lady who finds that true love has no interest in playing by her rules. But how can she choose between what she wants and what everyone around her expects her to want? This gentle but sharp comedy has it all: surprise encounters, jealousy and revenge, conventional fools and unconventional sages, confrontation, loss, and eventual triumph."--Back cover.

Alluring, high-spirited American heiress Isabel - "I always want to know the things one shouldn't do ... so as to choose"--Is in Europe to seek her own destiny. But after refusing marriage proposals from both Lord Warburton, a "prince" of the aristocracy, and Caspar Goodwood, a "prince" of American industry, Isabel becomes utterly captivated by the languid charms of Gilbert Osmond, whom she sees as the "prince" she has been looking for. To him, she...

Considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written, this book is Tolstoy's classic tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A rich and complex masterpiece, the novel charts the disastrous course of a love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer. Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters, and in doing so captures...

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...

Wealth is certainly a most desirable thing, but poverty has its sunny side . . .” It's Christmas time . . . The March family has fallen on bad times after the father lost their money. The four March sisters-the nearly perfect ‘little woman' Meg, the tomboyish Jo, the shy but wise Beth, and the artist of the family Amy-are planning to brighten up their Christmas by buying presents while their father is away, fighting the Civil War. Featuring...

A twist on the classic tale of "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" takes the story even further as the lady goes about swallowing up a variety of elements of autumn, including some leaves, a pumpkin, and some hay.

In this variation on the traditional cumulative rhyme, a woman swallows a shell, a crab, a fish, a gull, a pail, some sand, and a wave.