Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> Classics

With an Introduction and Notes by Phillip Mallett, Senior Lecturer in English, University of St Andrews.

Educated beyond her station, Grace Melbury returns to the woodland village of little Hintock and cannot marry her intended, Giles Winterborne. Her alternative choice proves disastrous, and in a moving tale that has vibrant characters, many humorous moments and genuine pathos coupled with tragic irony, Hardy eschews a happy ending.

With characteristic derision, he exposes the cruel indifference of the archaic legal system off his day, and shows the tragic...

When fifteen-year-old orphan John Trenchard is banished by his Aunt Jane, he goes to live at the local inn with the mysterious Elzevir Block, whose son has been killed by Customs Officers. Unofficially adopted by Block, John comes to learn the reasons for the noises in the graveyard at night, of 'Blackbeard' Mohune's lost treasure and Elzevir Block's secret.

This dashing tale of eighteenth-century Dorset smugglers will be enjoyed by all who love stories of derring-do written in the tradition of Treasure Island.

Introduction and Notes by Jane Thomas, University of Hull.

The Well-Beloved completes the cycle of Hardy's great novels, reiterating his favourite themes of man's eternal quest for perfection in both love and art, and the suffering that ensues. Jocelyn Pierston, celebrated sculptor, tries to create an image of his ideal woman - his imaginary Well-Beloved - in stone, just as he tries to find her in the flesh.

Powerful symbolism marks this romantic fantasy that Hardy has grounded firmly in reality with a characteristically authentic rendering of...

With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury.

Jonathan Swift's classic satirical narrative was first published in 1726, seven years after Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (one of its few rivals in fame and breadth of appeal).

As a parody travel-memoir it reports on extraordinary lands and societies, whose names have entered the English language: notably the minute inhabitants of Lilliput, the giants of Brobdingnag, and the Yahoos in Houyhnhnmland, where talking horses are the dominant species. It...

Lively and mischievous, idle and brave, Tom Brown is both the typical boy of his time and the perennial hero celebrated by authors as diverse as Henry Fielding (in Tom Jones) and Alec Waugh (in The Loom of Youth).

The book describes Tom's time at Rugby School from his first football match, through his troubled adolescence when he is savagely bullied by the unspeakable Flashman, to his departure for a wider world as a confident young man. This classic tale of a boy's schooldays under the benevolent eye of the renowned Dr Arnold still retains the appeal for which it was acclaimed on...

In the renowned translation by Edward FitzGerald, with an introduction by Professor Cedric Watts.

Here is Edward FitzGerald's original translation of the Rubaiyat, the collection of poems attributed to the Persian astronomer and mathematician, Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald's distinctive version (1859), with its oriental imagery and sensual warmth, made an exotic appeal to the Victorian imagination. Its scepticism fitted a time of increasing religious doubt; its romantic melancholy resonated with the writings of Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy; and its epicureanism...

With an Introduction and Notes by Charles P.C. Pettit.

Thomas Hardy's only historical novel, The Trumpet Major is set in Wessex during the Napoleonic Wars. Hardy skilfully immerses us in the life of the day, making us feel the impact of historical events on the immemorial local way of life - the glamour of the coming of George III and his soldiery, fears of the press-gang and invasion, and the effect of distant but momentous events like the Battle of Trafalgar.

He interweaves a compelling, bitter-sweet romantic love story of the rivalry of two...

With an Introduction and Notes by Karl Ashley Smith, University of St Andrews.

Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz).

Mr Dombey is a man obsessed with his firm. His son is groomed from birth to take his place within it, despite his visionary eccentricity and declining health. But Dombey also has a daughter, whose unfailing love for her father goes unreturned. 'Girls' said Mr Dombey, 'have nothing to do with Dombey and Son'.

When Walter Gay, a young clerk in her father's office, rescues her from a bewildering...

Introduction and Notes by Norman Vance, Professor of English, University of Sussex.

Jude Fawley is a rural stone mason with intellectual aspirations. Frustrated by poverty and the indifference of the academic institutions at the University of Christminster, his only chance of fulfilment seems to lie in his relationship with his unconventional cousin, Sue Bridehead. But life as social outcasts proves undermining, and when tragedy occurs, Sue has no resilience and Jude is left in despair.

Hardy's portrait of Jude, the idealist and dreamer who is a prisoner of...

With an Introduction by Lionel Kelly, University of Reading.

Translated by C.J. Hogarth.

Fathers and Sons is one of the greatest nineteenth century Russian novels, and has long been acclaimed as Turgenev's finest work. It is a political novel set in a domestic context, with a universal theme, the generational divide between fathers and sons. Set in 1859 at the moment when the Russian autocratic state began to move hesitantly towards social and political reform, the novel explores the conflict between the liberal-minded fathers of Russian...

With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Preston, University of Nottingham.

Illustrations by S.L. Fildes and Hablot K. Browne (Phiz).

Dickens's final novel, left unfinished at his death, is a tale of mystery whose fast-paced action takes place in an ancient cathedral city and in some of the darkest places in nineteenth-century London. Drugs, sexual obsession, colonial adventuring and puzzles about identity are among the novel's themes. At the centre of the plot lie the baffling disappearance of Edwin Drood and the many explanations of his...

Although Polish by birth, Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is regarded as one of the greatest writers in English, and Heart of Darkness, first published in 1902, is considered by many his "most famous, finest, and most enigmatic story." -- Encyclopaedia Britannica. The tale concerns the journey of the narrator (Marlow) up the Congo River on behalf of a Belgian trading company. Far upriver, he encounters the mysterious Kurtz, an ivory trader who exercises an almost godlike sway over the inhabitants of the region. Both repelled and fascinated by the man, Marlow is brought face to...

The Cherry Orchard was first produced by the Moscow Art Theatre on Chekhov's last birthday, January 17, 1904. Since that time it has become one of the most critically admired and performed plays in the Western world, a high comedy whose principal theme, the passing of the old semifeudal order, is symbolized in the sale of the cherry orchard owned by Madame Ranevsky.
The play also functions as a magnificent showcase for Chekhov's acute observations of his characters' foibles and for quizzical ruminations on the approaching dissolution of the world of the Russian aristocracy and...

In September of 1884, Robert Louis Stevenson, then in his mid-thirties, moved with his family to Bournemouth, a resort on the southern coast of England, where in the brief span of 23 months he revised A Child's Garden of Verses and wrote the novels Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
An intriguing combination of fantast thriller and moral allegory, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde depicts the gripping struggle of two opposing personalities -- one essentially good, the other evil -- for the soul of one man. Its tingling...

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) holds a unique place in American literature. Famous as a poet, he also penned short stories that are masterpieces of terror and suspense, infused with the horror and dread he knew from his feverish dreams and persistent fears of death. Fortunately for lovers of mystery, Poe was attracted by logic and analysis as well as fantasy. Fascinated by the narrative possibilities of tracking the perpetrator of a crime, he invented the modern detective story.
This superb collection of five stories reveals Poe's virtuoso gifts for both crime fiction and the macabre. Two...

Daisy Miller is a fascinating portrait of a young woman from Schenectady, New York, who, traveling in Europe, runs afoul of the socially pretentious American expatriate community in Rome. First published in 1878, the novella brought American novelist Henry James (1843-1916), then living in London, his first international success. Like many of James' early works, it portrays a venturesome American girl in the treacherous waters of European society -- a theme that would culminate in his 1881 masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady.
On the surface, Daisy Miller unfolds a simple...