Jane Austen

Two sisters of opposing temperaments who share the pangs of tragic love provide the theme for Jane Austen's dramatically human narrative. Elinor, practical and conventional, is the perfection of sense. Marianne, emotional and sentimental, is the embodiment of sensibility. To each comes the sorrow of unhappy love. Their mutual suffering brings a closer understanding between the two sisters—and true love finally triumphs when sense gives way to sensibility and sensibility gives way to sense. Jane Austen's authentic representation of early-nineteenth-century middle-class provincial life, written with forceful insight and gentle irony, makes her novels the enduring works on the mores and manners of her time.With an Introduction by Margaret Drabble and an Afterword by Mary Balogh

One of the most universally loved and admired English novels, Pride and Prejudice was penned as a popular entertainment. But the consummate artistry of Jane Austen (1775–1817) transformed this effervescent tale of rural romance into a witty, shrewdly observed satire of English country life that is now regarded as one of the principal treasures of English language. In a remote Hertfordshire village, far off the good coach roads of George III's England, a country squire of no great means must marry off his five vivacious daughters. At the heart of this all-consuming enterprise are his headstrong second daughter Elizabeth Bennet and her aristocratic suitor Fitzwilliam Darcy — two lovers whose pride must be humbled and prejudices dissolved before the novel can come to its splendid conclusion.

Twenty-seven-year old Anne Elliot is Austen's most adult heroine. Eight years before the story proper begins, she is happily betrothed to a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, but she precipitously breaks off the engagement when persuaded by her friend Lady Russell that such a match is unworthy. The breakup produces in Anne a deep and long-lasting regret. When later Wentworth returns from sea a rich and successful captain, he finds Anne's family on the brink of financial ruin and his own sister a tenant in Kellynch Hall, the Elliot estate. All the tension of the novel revolves around one question: Will Anne and Wentworth be reunited in their love? Jane Austen once compared her writing to painting on a little bit of ivory, 2 inches square. Readers of Persuasion will discover that neither her skill for delicate, ironic observations on social custom, love, and marriage nor her ability to apply a sharp focus lens to English manners and morals has deserted her in her final finished work.

This special edition of Northanger Abbey includes the famous illustrations by Henry Matthew Brock, originally created in 1898. Brock and his brothers were all successful illustrators of the day and often posed for each other using costumes, props and furniture in their Cambridge studio. Brock's older brother Charles joined him in illustrating other Jane Austen releases for this set of 1898 editions. Northanger Abbey was Austen's first completed novel but was published posthumously in 1817. Austen sold the novel to a bookseller in 1803 - for £10 - who decided not to publish it. Her brother bought it back for the same amount after her death. Catherine Morland is the daughter of a country clergyman, one of ten children. She devours Gothic novels and has an active imagination. After a lively season in Bath, she is invited to Northanger Abbey, where she finds the house is not the dark, moody Gothic mansion of her imaginings. Catherine's exciting season in Bath leads her to become acquainted with the dashing John Thorpe, who encourages her flights of fancy and attempts to divert her from his rival Henry Tilney. But Henry extends an invitation she can't resist and she finds herself visiting Northanger Abbey. There, as a "heroine in training," she is determined to bring one of her favorite Gothic novels to life, but the charming and very down to earth Mr. Tilney eventually brings her to see that real life can be even more interesting than the most spine-chilling Gothic fantasy.

Mansfield Park is a novel by Jane Austen, published in May 1814. At the age of ten, Fanny Price leaves her Portsmouth home to be brought up among the family of her wealthy uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, the owner of Mansfield Park. There she must accepts her lowly status ...

Clever, rich - and single - Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protegee Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austen's most flawless work.

Widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction, Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina his first true novel, after he came to consider War and Peace to be more than a novel. Fyodor Dostoyevsky declared it "flawless as a work of art." His opinion was shared by Vladimir Nabokov, who especially admired "the flawless magic of Tolstoy's style," and by William Faulkner, who described the novel as "the best ever written."The novel remains popular, as demonstrated by a 2007 Time poll of 125 contemporary authors in which Anna Karenina was voted the "greatest book ever written."

Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed in Florence, Italy; it could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960. (A private edition was issued by Inky Stephensen's Mandrake Press in 1929).[1] The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical relationship between a working-class man and an aristocratic woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of (at the time) unprintable words. The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Eastwood in Nottinghamshire where he grew up. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story.[2] Lawrence at one time considered calling the novel Tenderness and made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition. It has been published in three different versions.

The Lady of the Camellias (French: La Dame aux camélias) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils, first published in 1848, that was subsequently adapted for the stage. The Lady of the Camellias premiered at the Théatre du Vaudeville in Paris, France on February 2, 1852. An instant success, Giuseppe Verdi immediately set about to put the story to music. His work became the 1853 opera La Traviata with the female protagonist "Marguerite Gautier" renamed "Violetta Valéry". In the English-speaking world, The Lady of the Camellias became known as Camille and 16 versions have been performed at Broadway theatres alone. The titular lady is Marguerite Gautier, who is based on Rose Marie Duplessis, the real-life lover of author Dumas, fils.

SOON after sunrise, on a cloudy morning in the year 1881, a special messenger disturbed the repose of Dennis Howmore, at his place of residence in the pleasant Irish town of Ardoon. Well acquainted apparently with the way upstairs, the man thumped on a bed-room door, and shouted his message through it: “The master wants you, and mind you don’t keep him waiting.” The person sending this peremptory message was Sir Giles Mountjoy of Ardoon, knight and banker. The person receiving the message was Sir Giles’s head clerk. As a matter of course, Dennis Howmore dressed himself at full speed, and hastened to his employer’s private house on the outskirts of the town.

Les Misérables is a French historical novel by Victor Hugo, first published in 1862, that is considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. In the English-speaking world, the novel is usually referred to by its original French title. However, several alternatives have been used, including The Miserables, The Wretched, The Miserable Ones, The Poor Ones, The Wretched Poor, The Victims and The Dispossessed. Beginning in 1815 and culminating in the 1832 June Rebellion in Paris, the novel follows the lives and interactions of several characters, particularly the struggles of ex-convict Jean Valjean and his experience of redemption.

The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) is an epistolary and loosely autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774; a revised edition of the novel was published in 1787. Werther was an important novel of the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and influenced the later Romantic literary movement. The book made Goethe one of the first international literary celebrities. Toward the end of his life, a personal visit to Weimar became crucial to any young man's tour of Europe.

Sail away for nautical adventure and romance in this tale from Robert Barr. A British officer en route to America via cruise ship has an unexpected encounter with a fellow passenger, an American woman, and soon finds himself head-over-heels in love. But messy romantic entanglements lead to larger problems that threaten to end the budding relationship before it really begins.

Sister Carrie is a novel by Theodore Dreiser about a young country girl who moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream, first as a mistress to men that she perceives as superior, and later becoming a famous actress.

The moon had newly risen, a late October moon, a pale almost imperceptible crescent, above the dark pine spires in the thicket through which Roderick Vawdrey came, gun in hand, after a long day’s rabbit-shooting. It was not his nearest way home, but he liked the broad clearing in the pine wood, which had a ghostly look at dusk, and was so still and lonely that the dart of a squirrel through the fallen leaves was a startling event.

AT last, after so many years, I have the pleasure of re-introducing you to ‘Prince Otto,’ whom you will remember a very little fellow, no bigger in fact than a few sheets of memoranda written for me by your kind hand. The sight of his name will carry you back to an old wooden house embowered in creepers; a house that was far gone in the respectable stages of antiquity and seemed indissoluble from the green garden in which it stood, and that yet was a sea-traveller in its younger days, and had come round the Horn piecemeal in the belly of a ship, and might have heard the seamen stamping and shouting and the note of the boatswain’s whistle.