While enjoying a six weeks' stay in fashionable Bath, the young and callow Catherine Morland is introduced to the delights of high society. Thanks to a new literary diet of the sensational and the macabre, Catherine travels to Northanger Abbey fully expecting to become embroiled in a Gothic adventure of intrigue and suspense - and, once there, soon begins to form the most gruesome and improbable theories about the exploits of its occupants.An early...

A classic tale of an orphan growing up in the 1800's of England. Intimately rooted in the author's own biography and written as a first-person narrative, "David Copperfield" charts a young man's progress through a difficult childhood in Victorian England to ultimate success as a novelist, finding true love along the way.

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...

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...

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...

The story of thirteen-year-old Rose Campbell, who finds herself in the care of her extended family after her wealthy father dies. Surrounded by her great-aunts, her father's brothers, their wives, and her seven rambunctious male cousins - and finding a fast friend in young housemaid Phebe - Rose spends a year taking chances, learning new things, and discovering what it means to be part of a large, loving family.

Times are tough around the little brown house! The widowed Mrs. Pepper has to sew all day long just to earn enough to pay the rent and to feed the five growing Peppers. But she faces poverty and trouble with a stout heart, a smiling face, and the help of her jolly brood: blue-eyed Ben, the eldest and the man of the house at the age of 11; pretty Polly, so eager to cook for the family and make everyone happy and comfortable; and the three littlest...

The most popular pirate story ever written in English, featuring one of literature's most beloved “bad guys,” Treasure Island has been happily devoured by several generations of boys-and girls-and grownups. Its unforgettable characters include: young Jim Hawkins, who finds himself owner of a map to Treasure Island, where the fabled pirate booty is buried; honest Captain Smollett, heroic Dr. Livesey, and the good-hearted but obtuse Squire Trelawney,...

This faithful but unpretending record of a remarkable adventure is hereby respectfully dedicated by the narrator to all the big boys and little boys who read it. I offer apologies for my blunt way of writing. I can but say in excuse of it that I am more accustomed to handling a rifle than a pen. This is the strange history of our journey into the heart of Kukuanaland; a trek into the interior of the dark continent to find a lost friend and discover...

After being cracked on the head with a crowbar at the Colt factory in Hartford, Connecticut, Hank Morgan awakens to find himself in sixth-century England. Captured by a knight and sentenced to death by King Arthur, the cagey Yankee instead becomes the king's right-hand wizard. Though homesick for the nineteenth century, Morgan makes the best of his surroundings, setting up factories and phone lines, as well as introducing such strange customs as advertising...