In a profoundly moving, intellectually acute novel (Philadelphia Inquirer) that is as meticulous as Jane Austen, as deadly as Evelyn Waugh (Los Angeles Times), Margaret Drabble conjures up a retired writer besieged by her three grasping children in this dazzling, wickedly gothic tale.
"

Margaret Drabble s affecting novel, set in London during the 1960s, about a casual love affair, an unplanned pregnancy, and one young woman s decision to become a mother.
"

In the early 1900s, Bessie Bawtry, a small child with big notions, lives in a South Yorkshire mining town in England. Precocious and refined in a land of little ambition and much mining grime, Bessie waits for the day she can escape the bleak, coarse existence her ancestors had seldom questioned.
Nearly a century later Bessie's granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has returned to the depressed little town in which Bessie grew up and wonders at the families who never left. Confronted with what would have been her life had her grandmother...

When circumstances compel her to start over late in her life, Candida Wilton moves from a beautiful Georgian house in lovely Suffolk to a two-room, walk-up flat in a run-down building in central London--and begins to pour her soul into a diary. Candida is not exactly destitute. So, is the move perversity, she wonders, a survival test, or is she punishing herself? How will she adjust to this shabby, menacing, but curiously appealing city? What can happen, at her age, to change her life?
In a voice that is pitch-perfect, Candida describes her health club, her social circle, and her attempts...

Simon Camish, an embittered, diffident lawyer in a loveless marriage, would not have particularly noticed Rose Vassiliou had he not been asked to drive her home one night after a dinner party. Yet at one time she had been notorious-her name constantly in the news.
Now, separated from her Greek husband, she lives alone with her three children. Despite all the efforts and sneers of her friends, she refuses to move from her slum house in a decaying neighborhood to which she has become attached. Gradually, Simon becomes aware that Rose is a woman of remarkable integrity and courage. He is...

Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy's passionate tale of the beautiful, headstrong farmer Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors, firmly established the thirty-four-year-old writer as a popular novelist. According to Virginia Woolf, "The subject was right; the method was right; the poet and the countryman, the sensual man, the sombre reflective man, the man of learning, all enlisted to produce a book which . . . must hold its place among the great English novels." Introducing the fictional name of "Wessex" to describe Hardy's legendary countryside, this early masterpiece draws a vivid...

Jane Austen's witty comedy of manners is one of the most universally loved and admired English novels of all time.

Spirited Elizabeth Bennet is one of a family of five daughters, and with no male heir, the Bennet estate must someday pass to their priggish cousin William Collins. Therefore, the girls must marry well--and thus is launched the story of Elizabeth and the arrogant bachelor Mr. Darcy, in a novel renowned as the epitome of romance and wit. Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's masterwork, an entertaining portrait of matrimonial rites and rivalries, timeless in its...

A fascinating, hilarious, and timeless coming-of-age tale featuring one of Jane Austen's most memorable characters.

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition...had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."

The celebrated opening of Jane Austen's Emma introduces readers to a supremely self-assured and accomplished young woman who believes herself immune to romance. By turns brilliant and foolish, self-aware and self-deluding, Emma "leaps from error to error,"...

Featuring one of her most likeable characters, this sparkling love story set in a seaside resort is Jane Austen's final finished work.
Since Anne Elliot eight years ago rejected the marriage proposal of Captain Wentworth, a penniless naval officer, she has resigned herself to a quiet life at home, tending to the imagined needs of her spoiled sisters and vain father (Austen's brilliant, utterly conceited creation, Sir Walter Elliot). But when Captain Wentworth reappears in their midst, having made his fortune at sea, Anne must ask herself whether she made the right decision--or...

Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman spent a summer together as children in Ornemouth, a town by the gray North Sea. Now, as they journey back toreceive honorary degrees from a new university thereHumphrey on the train, Ailsa flyingthey take stock of their lives, their careers, and their shared personal entanglements, romantic and otherwise. Humphrey is a successful marine biologist, happiest under water, but now retired; Ailsa, scholar and feminist, is celebrated for her pioneering studies of gender. Their mutual pasts unfold in an exquisite portrait of English social life in thelatter half of...