This selection of stories by Katherine Mansfield has been chosen by Claire Tomalin and emphasize the stronger, feminist side of her writing rather than the popular, more sentimental view. The 21 stori
The first products of Joyce's maturity, these stories look sideways to the tender realism of Chekhov and forward to Joyce's later work "Portrait of the Artist". In the most celebrated tale, "The Dead"
When a beautiful, spoilt, aristocratic woman with revolutionary ambitions meets an idealistic young proletarian conspirator who dreams of a better life, the stage is set for The Princess Casamassima i
This is a documentary-style account of political unrest and personal travail in a late 19th-century French coalfield. Despite the grimness of his subject and the accuracy of his description, Zola tell
Uses the narrative of a mock travel writer to explore exotic and imaginary locations. This book mounts a scathing attack on the morals, politics and learning of the 18th century, culminating in possib
The novel takes its wide-eyed hero from innocence to experience through inns and bedrooms from Somerset to London and back, while at the same time continuing a farcical debate about the true nature of
This is the story of a woman and her family experiencing the passage of time and seeking to recapture meaning from the flux of things. Though Mrs Ramsay's death is the event on which the novel turns,
Featuring part fairy tale and part thinly veiled autobiography, the author transmutes his life experience into a brilliant series of comic and sentimental adventures in the spirit of the great eightee
This is the spirited story of a survivor whose racy anecdotes and shady dealings only underline her essential warmth and goodness. But there is nothing sentimental about Moll, who presents herself war
Set in the bleak, magical Wessex landscape so familiar from Hardy's early work, Tess's cruel story reveals circumstances slowly closing in on her as she attempts to grasp a few moments of happiness wi
This is a selection of the poet's work, including all the great lyrics and the more important prophetic books. In her introduction the poet and critic expounds Blake's esoteric theory and shows how
A mixture of reality and illusion, this is the story of the besotted Don Quixote and his down-to-earth companion, the faithful Sancho Panza, who set out to right the world's wrongs in knightly combat.
In these three sea stories, based on his own experience, the author invests his portraits of mundane steamers and their crews with epic qualities of fortitude and courage in the face of overwhelming n
A tale of quiet lives in an early 19th-century English provincial town which engages the reader at every level, from the author's chronicle of everyday details to the most exacting philosophical and m
A mock autobiography, in which the hero wrestles with the impossibility of explaining anything without explaining everything. In the process he explores every conceivable fictional device in a brillia
The complex story of a notorious law-suit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of 19th-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the
A classic novel which follows Stephen Dedalus as he progresses from boyhood to his coming of age in Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century, describing his sexual awakening, his intellectual deve
A story of passionate love, travail and final triumph. The relationship between the heroine and Mr Rochester is only one episode, albeit the most important, in a detailed fictional autobiography in wh
Set in the years before and after Waterloo, the novel tells the parallel stories of two schoolfriends - the quiet, long-suffering Amelia and her brilliant, scheming friend, Becky Sharp. The novel port
