'I hated the office. I hated my work...the only career in life within my reach was that of an author.'
The only autobiography by a major Victorian novelist, Trollope's account offers a fascinating insight into his literary life and opinions. After a miserable childhood and misspent youth, Trollope turned his life around at the age of twenty-six. By 1860 the 'hobbledehoy' had become both a senior civil servant and a best-selling novelist. He worked for the Post Office for many years and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. Best-known for the two series of novels grouped...

'An indescribable, aching, futile longing for myself'
The young Danish aristocrat Malte Laurids Brigge has been left rootless by the early death of his parents. Now living in Paris, Malte begins to record his life in a series of loosely connected notes, diary entries, prose poems, parables and stories, ostensibly collected by a fictional editor to form the Notebooks. Focusing on Malte's observations and experiences in the present, recollections of his childhood and family, and his reflections on historical events, these notes in highly crafted poetic prose...

'Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.'

It is impossible to be sure who Melmotte is, let alone what exactly he has done. He is, seemingly, a gentleman, and a great financier, who penetrates to the heart of the state, reaching even inside the Houses of Parliament. He draws the English establishment into his circle, including Lady Carbury, a 43 year-old coquette and her son Felix, who is persuaded to invest in a notional railway business. Huge sums of money are at stake, as well as romantic happiness.

The Way We Live...

Swann in Love is a brilliant, devastating novella that tells of infatuation, love, and jealousy. Set against the backdrop of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, the story of Charles Swann illuminates the fragilities and foibles of human beings when in the grip of desire. Swann is a highly cultured man-about-town who is plunged into turmoil when he falls for a young woman called Odette de Crecy. The novel traces the progress of Swann's emotions with penetrating exactitude as he encounters Odette at the regular gatherings in the salon of the Verdurins. His wilful self-delusion...

Father Schedoni is enlisted by the imperious Marchesa di Vivaldi to prevent her son from marrying the beautiful Ellena. Schedoni has no scruples in kidnapping Ellena and in undertaking whatever villainy will further his own ends. His menacing presence dominates a gripping tale of love and betrayal, abduction and assassination, and incarceration in the dreadful dungeons of the Inquisition. Uncertainty and doubt lie everywhere, in Radcliffe's last and most unnerving novel.
Ann Radcliffe defined the "terror" genre of writing and helped to establish the Gothic novel, thrilling readers with...

At the village of Lympne, on the south coast of England, the "most uneventful place in the world" the failed playwright Mr. Bedford meets the brilliant inventor Mr. Cavor, and together they invade the moon.
Dreaming respectively of scientific renown and of mineral wealth, they fashion a sphere from the gravity-defying substance Cavorite and go where no human has gone before. They expect a dead world, but instead they find lunar plants that grow in a single day, giant moon-calves and the ant-like Selenites, the super-adapted inhabitants of the Moon's utopian society.
The First...

Three notebooks of Jane Austen's early writings survive. The pieces probably date from 1786 or 1787, around the time that Jane, aged 11 or 12, and her older sister and collaborator Cassandra left school. By this point Austen was already an indiscriminate and precocious reader, devouring pulp fiction and classic literature alike; what she read, she soon began to imitate and parody.

Unlike many teenage writings then and now, these are not secret or agonized confessions entrusted to a private journal and for the writer's eyes alone. Rather, they are stories to be shared and admired by a...

A shipwrecked Edward Prendick finds himself stranded on a remote Noble island, the guest of a notorious scientist, Doctor Moreau. Disturbed by the cries of animals in pain, and by his encounters with half-bestial creatures, Edward slowly realizes his danger and the extremes of the Doctor's experiments.
Saturated in pain and disgust, suffused with grotesque and often unbearable images of torture and bodily mutilation, The Island of Doctor Moreau is unquestionably a shocking novel. It is also a serious, and highly knowledgeable, philosophical engagement with Wells's times, with...

Sybil, or The Two Nations is one of the finest novels to depict the social problems of class-ridden Victorian England. The book's publication in 1845 created a sensation, for its immediacy and readability brought the plight of the working classes sharply to the attention of the reading public. The "two nations" of the alternative title are the rich and poor, so disparate in their opportunities and living conditions, and so hostile to each other, that they seem almost to belong to different countries. The gulf between them is given a poignant focus by the central romantic...

At a Victorian dinner party in Richmond, London, the Time Traveler returns to tell his extraordinary tale of mankind's future in the year 802,701 AD. It is a dystopian vision of Darwinian evolution, with humans split into an above-ground species of Eloi, and their troglodyte brothers.
The first book H. G. Wells published, The Time Machine is a scientific romance that helped invent the genre of science fiction and the time travel story. Even before its serialization had finished in the spring of 1895, Wells had been declared "a man of genius," and the book heralded a fifty year...