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American author and expatriate, Henry James is regarded as one the principal figures of 19th century literary realism. His work, which often features Americans traveling to Europe, is noted for its intimate examination of the consciousness of his characters. In this volume, we find two of his most popular works. "The Turn of the Screw" is an intense psychological tale of terror. Beginning in an old house on Christmas Eve, it is the story of a governess,...

A formally innovative work of modernist fiction, Virginia Woolf's The Waves is edited with an introduction by Kate Flint in Penguin Modern Classics. More than any of Virginia Woolf's other novels, The Waves conveys the full complexity and richness of human experience. Tracing the lives of a group of friends, The Waves follows their development from childhood to youth and middle age. While social events, individual achievements and disappointments...

When Harvey Cheyne, the precocious and arrogant son of an American railway tycoon, is rescued from drowning by a New England fishing boat, he is unable to convince the crew to take him to shore and is forced to take a job on board the schooner. With no other choice, he must quickly adapt to life at sea, learning to sail and to fish. Thrown into this unfamiliar environment, he comes to understand the importance of hard work and dignity, and begins...

In Germany, Hall met Mabel Batten and fell in love despite the twenty-three year age difference. Batten gave Hall the nickname 'John' by which she was henceforward known in every circumstance throughout her life except in her work as an author. In 1915, Hall met and, in 1917 moved in with sculptor Una Troubridge, with whom she would remain for the rest of her life. Hall wrote poetry all throughout her twenties and thirties. She had published Dedicated

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"Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South is the story of Margaret Hale, the daughter of a local priest in Hampshire, whose father decides to leave his country church after a serious crisis of faith. All the events that follow happen in the fictional industrial English town named Milton to which the Hale family has moved. Thus, part of the narrative focuses on the juxtaposition between industrial areas and the countryside. Margaret is very critical of...

Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel depicts nothing less than the great clashes between capital and labour, which arose from rapid industrialisation and problems of trade in the mid-nineteenth century. But these clashes are dramatized through personal struggles. John Barton has to reconcile his personal conscience with his socialist duty, risking his life and liberty in the process. His daughter Mary is caught between two lovers, from opposing classes...

Twenty Years After is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, first published in 1845. It is the sequel to the famous novel "The Three Musketeers" and continues the story of the musketeers 20 years after the events of the first book.The novel follows the adventures of the musketeers Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, as well as their friend, the former musketeer D'Artagnan, who is now a lieutenant in the king's musketeers. The story takes place during the reign of Louis...

Lucia is one of the great comic characters in English literature. Outrageously pretentious, hypocritical and snobbish, Queen Lucia, 'as by right divine' rules over the toy kingdom of 'Riseholme' based on the Cotswold village of Broadway. Her long-suffering husband Pepino is 'her prince-consort', the outrageously camp Georgie is her 'gentleman-in-waiting', the village green is her 'parliament', and her subjects, such as Daisy Quantock, are hapless

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Four bumbling members of a nineteenth-century London social club, known as the legendary Pickwick Club, journey to places outside the city and become involved in romantic foibles, danger, and a few legal scrapes.

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...