Making her debut in London society, Nanda Brookenham is being groomed for the marriage market. Thrust suddenly into the superficial and immoral circle that surrounds her mother, the innocent but independent-minded young woman even finds herself in competition with Mrs Brookenham for the affection of the man she admires. Only an elderly bachelor, Mr Longdon, is immune to this world of greed and scheming, and determines to rescue Nanda from its corrupting...

Chance (1914) was the first of Conrad's novels to bring him popular success and it holds a unique place among his works. It tells the story of Flora de Barral, a vulnerable and abandoned young girl who is "like a beggar, without a right to anything but compassion." After her bankrupt father is imprisoned, she learns the harsh fact that a woman in her position "has no resources but in herself." Her only means of action is to be what she is. Flora's...

Charity Royall, a New Englander of humble origins, begins a torrid love affair with aristocratic Lucius Harney against all societal norms.

Classic novella about a captivating young American, Daisy Miller, whose behavior causes conflicting feelings in the mind of would-be suitor, Winterbourne.

"The story of a young woman from Wisconsin who goes to Chicago, becomes an actress, marries and moves to New York, and when her husband loses his job, returns to the stage." ***"A powerful account of a young working girl's rise to the 'tinsel and shine' of worldly success, and of the slow decline of her lover and protector Hurstwood." Oxford Companion to Engl Lit. ***"Plain, unaffected, and unconventional story of the actual life of the lower middle-classes...

First published in 1911, a satiric look at undergraduate life at Oxford recounts the humorous impact of a visit by Zuleika, a beautiful young woman, during Eights Week.

Several years after Rose Campbell was adopted by her uncle Alec, she and Phebe return from an extended trip to Europe, now young women ready to make their entrance into society. Though her uncle disapproves of fashionable society, Rose makes a deal with him: she'll have three months to attend parties and explore courting her way before she returns to his serious way of living.

Fanny Burney's renowned epistolary novel is a satirical tale detailing a young woman's journey through eighteenth-century London's fashionable society. Evelina is an early example of romanticism, sensibility, and the novel of manners. Evelina Anville is a beautiful young woman who falls into the wrong circles after leaving her secluded home for the first time. The story takes place in both London and Hot Wells, Bristol, in a series of letters....

"George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career;...

We meet young free-spirited Rachel Vinrace aboard her father's ship, the Euphrosyne, departing London for South America. Surrounded by a clutch of genteel companions -- among them her aunt Helen, who judges Rachel to be "vacillating," "emotional," and "more than normally incompetent for her years" -- Rachel displays a startling maturity when she finds her engagement to the writer Terence Hewet listing toward disaster.