Search results for ""Wordsworth Editions Ltd""

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Carole Jones, freelance writer and researcher. George Eliot's final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), follows the intertwining lives of the beautiful but spoiled and selfish Gwendolene Harleth and the selfless yet alienated Daniel Deronda, as they search for personal and vocational fulfilment and sympathetic relationship. Set largely in the degenerate English aristocratic society of the 1860s, Daniel Deronda charts their search for meaningful lives against a background of imperialism, the oppression of women, and racial and religious prejudice. Gwendolen's attempts to escape a sadistic relationship and atone for past actions catalyse her friendship with Deronda, while his search for origins leads him, via Judaism, to a quest for moral growth. Eliot's radical dual narrative constantly challenges all solutions and ensures that the novel is as controversial now, as when it first appeared.

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With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. The diverse tales selected for this volume display the astonishing virtuosity of Rudyard Kipling's early writings. A Nobel prize-winner, Kipling was phenomenally productive and imaginative, displaying a literary mastery of idioms, technology and technical terms, exotic locations, and social range. He gained immense popularity, becoming (as these stories indicate) the knowledgeable spokesman for a wide public. Later, although Kipling's right-wing views increasingly incurred hostility, his creativity remained formidable. In this rich collection, we encounter bold realism, poignant nostalgia, dark comedy, the vividly horrific, the exuberantly fanciful and the disturbingly uncanny.

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Introduction and Notes by R.T. Jones, Honorary Fellow of the University of York. Although the shortest of George Eliot's novels, Silas Marner is one of her most admired and loved works. It tells the sad story of the unjustly exiled Silas Marner - a handloom linen weaver of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England - and how he is restored to life by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie. Silas Marner is a tender and moving tale of sin and repentance set in a vanished rural world and holds the reader's attention until the last page as Eppie's bonds of affection for Silas are put to the test.

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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 brothers for the hand of the heroine Anne Garland, played out against the loves of a lively gallery of other characters. While there are elements of sadness and even tragedy, The Trumpet-Major shows Hardy's skills of story-telling, characterisation and description in a novel of vitality, comedy and warmth.

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With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Merchant. Canterbury Christ Church College. The tough-mindedness of the social satire in and its air of palpable integrity give this novel a special place in Anthony Trollope's Literary career. Trollope paints a picture as panoramic as his title promises, of the life of 1870s London, the loves of those drawn to and through the city, and the career of Augustus Melmotte. Melmotte is one of the Victorian novel's greatest and strangest creations, and is an achievement undimmed by the passage of time. Trollope's 'Now' might, in the twenty-first century, look like some distant disenchanted 'Then', but this is still the yesterday which we must understand in order to make proper sense of our today.

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With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. A Pair of Blue Eyes, though early in the sequence of Hardy's novels, is lively and gripping. Its dramatic cliff-hanging episode, for example, is at once tense, ironic, feministic and erotic. With settings in Wessex and London, the novel also has some strongly autobiographical features, as the blue-eyed heroine, Elfride Swancourt, is based largely on Emma Gifford, who became Thomas Hardy's first wife. Elfride's vivacious nature attracts several lovers, but she is beset by sexual prejudice, and the ensuing ironies reveal the constraints of her times. A Pair of Blue Eyes provides an engaging and moving experience for today's readers.

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With an Introduction by Antonia Till. William Wordsworth (1771-1850) is the foremost of the English Romantic poets. He was much influenced by the events of the French Revolution in his youth, and he deliberately broke away from the artificial diction of the Augustan and neo-classical tradition of the eighteenth century. He sought to write in the language of ordinary men and women, of ordinary thoughts, sights and sounds, and his early poetry represents this fresh approach to his art. Wordsworth spent most of his adult life in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy and his wife Mary, by whom he had four children. His remarkable autobiographical poem 'The Prelude' was completed in 1805, but was not published until after his death, and it is included in this full edition of Wordsworth's poetry.

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With an Introduction, Bibliography and Glossary by Michael Irwin, Professor of English Literature University of Kent at Canterbury. Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson and Browning. He was still writing with unimpaired power sixty years later, when Eliot and Yeats were the leading names in the field. His extraordinary stamina and a consistent individuality of style and vision made him a survivor, immune to literary fashion. At the start of the twenty-first century his reputation stands higher than it ever did, even in his own lifetime. He is now recognised not only as a great poet, but as one who is widely loved. He speaks with directness, humanity and humour to scholarly or ordinary readers alike.

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With an Introduction and Bibliography by Stephen Matterson, Trinity College, Dublin. Walt Whitman's verse gave the poetry of America a distinctive national voice. It reflects the unique vitality of the new nation, the vastness of the land and the emergence of a sometimes troubled consciousness, communicated in language and idiom regarded by many at the time as shocking. Whitman's poems are organic and free flowing, fit into no previously defined genre and skilfully combine autobiographical, sociological and religious themes with lyrical sensuality. His verse is a fitting celebration of a new breed of American and includes 'Song of Myself', 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry', the celebratory 'Passage to India', and his fine elegy for the assassinated President Lincoln, 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd'.

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Introduction, Notes and Bibliography by Dr Bruce Woodcock, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Hull. William Blake was an engraver, painter and visionary mystic as well as one of the most revolutionary of the Romantic poets. His writing attracted the astonished admiration of authors as diverse as Wordsworth, Ruskin, W.B.Yeats, and more recently beat poet Allen Ginsberg and the 'flower power' generation. He is one of England's most original artists whose works aim to liberate imaginative energies and subvert 'the mind-forged manacles' of restriction. This volume contains many of his writings, including: 'Songs of Innocence', 'Songs of Experience', 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell', and a generous selection from the Prophetic Books including 'Milton' and 'Jerusalem'.

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Translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. Edited with an Introduction by Enrique Chavez-Arvizo. Rene Descartes (1569-1650), the ‘father’ of modern philosophy, is without doubt one of the greatest thinkers in history: his genius lies at the core of our contemporary intellectual identity. Breaking with the conventions of his own time and suffering persecution by the Church as a consequence, Descartes in his writings - most of which are philosophical classics - attempted to answer the central questions surrounding the self, God, free-will and knowledge, using the science of thought as opposed to received wisdom based on the tenets of faith. This edition, the most comprehensive one-volume selection of Descartes' works available in English, includes his great essay, Discourse on Method.

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With an Introduction by Mishtooni Bose. More’s Utopia is a complex, innovative and penetrating contribution to political thought, culminating in the famous ’description’ of the Utopians, who live according to the principles of natural law, but are receptive to Christian teachings, who hold all possessions in common, and view gold as worthless. Drawing on the ideas of Plato, St Augustine and Aristotle, Utopia was to prove seminal in its turn, giving rise to the genres of utopian and dystopian prose fiction whose practitioners include Sir Francis Bacon, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. At once a critique of the social consequences of greed and a meditation on the personal cost of entering public service, Utopia dramatises the difficulty of balancing the competing claims of idealism and pragmatism, and continues to invite its readers to become participants in a compelling debate concerning the best state of a commonwealth.

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With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Merchant, Canterbury Christchurch University College The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful and sometimes violent novel of expectation, love, oppression, sin, religion and betrayal. It portrays the disintegration of the marriage of Helen Huntingdon, the mysterious ‘tenant’ of the title, and her dissolute, alcoholic husband. Defying convention, Helen leaves her husband to protect their young son from his father’s influence, and earns her own living as an artist. Whilst in hiding at Wildfell Hall, she encounters Gilbert Markham, who falls in love with her. On its first publication in 1848, Anne Brontë’s second novel was criticised for being ‘coarse’ and ‘brutal’. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall challenges the social conventions of the early nineteenth century in a strong defence of women’s rights in the face of psychological abuse from their husbands. Anne Brontë’s style is bold, naturalistic and passionate, and this novel, which her sister Charlotte considered ‘an entire mistake’, has earned Anne a position in English literature in her own right, not just as the youngest member of the Brontë family. This newly reset text is taken from a copy of the 1848 second edition in the Library of the Brontë Parsonage Museum and has been edited to correct known errors in that edition.

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With an Introduction and Notes by Esther Saxey The flaxen-haired beauty of the childlike Lady Audley would suggest that she has no secrets. But M.E. Braddon’s classic novel of sensation uncovers the truth about its heroine in a plot involving bigamy, arson and murder. It challenges assumptions about the nature of femininity and investigates the narrow divide between sanity and insanity, using as its focus one of the most fascinating of all Victorian heroines. Combining elements of the detective novel, the psychological thriller and the romance of upper class life, Lady Audley’s Secret was one of the most popular and successful novels of the nineteenth century and still exerts a powerful hold on readers.

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Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) and George Cattermole, with a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. This vivid historical and political novel by Dickens is centred on the infamous 'No Popery' riots, instigated by Lord George Gordon, which terrorised London in 1780. Dickens' targets are prejudice, intolerance, religious bigotry and nationalistic fervour, together with the villains who exploit these for selfish ends. His intense account of the riots is interwoven with the mysterious tale of a long-unsolved murder and with a romance involving forbidden love, treachery and heroism. Barnaby Rudge abounds in memorably strange, comic and grotesque characters. Furthermore, recent historical events have renewed its political topicality.

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Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal. Much Ado About Nothing has long been celebrated as one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies. The central relationship, between Benedick and Beatrice, is wittily combative until love prevails. Broader comedy is provided by Dogberry, Verges and the watchmen. The drama ranges between the destructively sinister and the lyrically romantic, giving the whole a complex and sometimes problematic character. Numerous revivals, in the theatre and on screen, have displayed the lively variety and interpretative openness of this engaging comedy.

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This is the opening play of Shakespeare's second great tetralogy. Although it is a historical drama, it possesses a haunting and lyrical nature. It explores the theme of kingship through insights into the problems of the weak King Richard.

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Introduction and Notes by Dr T.C.B. Cook Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz). Following the success of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby was hailed as a comic triumph and firmly established Dickens as a 'literary gentleman'. It has a full supporting cast of delectable characters that range from the iniquitous Wackford Squeers and his family, to the delightful Mrs Nickleby, taking in the eccentric Crummles and his travelling players, the Mantalinis, the Kenwigs and many more. Combining these with typically Dickensian elements of burlesque and farce, the novel is eminently suited to dramatic adaptation. So great was the impact as it left Dickens' pen that many pirated versions appeared in print before the original was even finished. Often neglected by critics, Nicholas Nickleby has never ceased to delight readers and is widely regarded as one of the greatest comic masterpieces of nineteenth-centure literature.

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With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury. From its first publication in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has been printed in over 700 editions. It has inspired almost every conceivable kind of imitation and variation, and been the subject of plays, opera, cartoons, and computer games. The character of Crusoe has entered the consciousness of each succeeding generation as readers add their own interpretation to the adventures so thrillingly 'recorded' by Defoe. Praised by eminent figures such as Coleridge, Rousseau and Wordsworth, this perennially popular book was cited by Karl Marx in Das Kapital to illustrate economic theory. However it is readers of all ages over the last 280 years who have given Robinson Crusoe its abiding position as a classic tale of adventure.

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Introduction and Notes by Dr Ian Littlewood, University of Sussex. Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results. The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her.

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With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading. Jane Austen teased readers with the idea of a 'heroine whom no one but myself will much like', but Emma is irresistible. 'Handsome, clever, and rich', Emma is also an 'imaginist', 'on fire with speculation and foresight'. She sees the signs of romance all around her, but thinks she will never be married. Her matchmaking maps out relationships that Jane Austen ironically tweaks into a clearer perspective. Judgement and imagination are matched in games the reader too can enjoy, and the end is a triumph of understanding.

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Introduction and Notes by John S. Whitley, University of Sussex. Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine's brother Hindley and wrongly believing that his love for Catherine is not reciprocated, leaves Wuthering Heights, only to return years later as a wealthy and polished man. He proceeds to exact a terrible revenge for his former miseries. The action of the story is chaotic and unremittingly violent, but the accomplished handling of a complex structure, the evocative descriptions of the lonely moorland setting and the poetic grandeur of vision combine to make this unique novel a masterpiece of English literature.

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With an Introduction and Notes by Stuart Hutchinson, University of Kent at Canterbury. Tom Sawyer, a shrewd and adventurous boy, is as much at home in the respectable world of his Aunt Polly as in the self-reliant and parentless world of his friend Huck Finn. The two enjoy a series of adventures, accidentally witnessing a murder, establishing the innocence of the man wrongly accused, as well as being hunted by Injun Joe, the true murderer, eventually escaping and finding the treasure that Joe had buried. Huckleberry Finn recounts the further adventures of Huck, who runs away from a drunken and brutal father, and meets up with the escaped slave Jim. They float down the Mississippi on a raft, participating in the lives of the characters they meet, witnessing corruption, moral decay and intellectual impoverishment. Sharing so much in background and character, these two stories, the best of Twain, indisputably belong together in one volume. Though originally written as adventure stories for young people, the vivid writing provides a profound commentary on provincial American life in the mid-nineteenth century and the institution of slavery.

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Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. Julius Caesar is among the best of Shakespeare's historical and political plays. Dealing with events surrounding the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., the drama vividly illustrates the ways in which power and corruption are linked. The cry ‘Peace, freedom and liberty!’ is used to exculpate brutal realities, while personal ambitions taint public actions. Rich in characterisation and replete with eloquent rhetoric, Julius Caesar remains engrossing and topical: a play for today.

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James Joyce’s astonishing masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during which Bloom’s voluptuous wife, Molly, commits adultery. Initially deemed obscene in England and the USA, this richly-allusive novel, revolutionary in its Modernistic experimentalism, was hailed as a work of genius by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. Scandalously frank, wittily erudite, mercurially eloquent, resourcefully comic and generously humane, Ulysses offers the reader a life-changing experience.

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Trapped in a marriage which has become sterile and joyless since her husband's return from the trenches of the First World War, partially paralysed and confined to a wheelchair, Connie seizes the chance of sexual fulfilment she had thought lost to her forever. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a world-wide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated edition. The famous ‘Lady Chatterley trial’ heralded the sexual revolution of the coming decades and signalled the defeat of Establishment prudery.

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Shakespeare’s Macbeth is one of the greatest tragic dramas the world has known. Macbeth himself, a brave warrior, is fatally impelled by supernatural forces, by his proud wife, and by his own burgeoning ambition. As he embarks on his murderous course to gain and retain the crown of Scotland, we see the appalling emotional and psychological effects on both Lady Macbeth and himself. The cruel ironies of their destiny are conveyed in poetry of unsurpassed power. In the theatre, this tragedy remains perennially engrossing.

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'There he lay looking as if youth had been half-renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey, the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst the swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.' Thus Bram Stoker, one of the greatest exponents of the supernatural narrative, describes the demonic subject of his chilling masterpiece Dracula, a truly iconic and unsettling tale of vampirism.

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‘…man is not truly one, but truly two.’ In this powerful deconstruction of Calvinist belief and the hypocrisy at the heart of Victorian society, Stevenson creates a gothic icon in the divided self that is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Born from a nightmare and anticipating Freud’s theory of the unconscious, Stevenson literalises the concepts of the supernatural doppelgänger and the split personality in a timeless tale of guilt, desire, and violence by which all subsequent ‘double’ stories must be judged. In seeking to cleanse his soul of sin, Dr Henry Jekyll instead unleashes a monster. First published in 1886, this tragic study of the duality of man established Stevenson’s international reputation as an author. This volume also contains Stevenson’s 1887 collection of short stories, The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables, which includes a further exploration of the mind of a murderer, ‘Markheim’, and the occult tales of terror, ‘The Merry Men’, ‘Olalla’, and ‘Thrawn Janet’.

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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.

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The Little Prince is a modern fable, and for readers far and wide both the title and the work have exerted a pull far in excess of the book’s brevity. Written and published first by Antoine de St-Exupéry in 1943, only a year before his plane disappeared on a reconnaissance flight, it is one of the world’s most widely translated books, enjoyed by adults and children alike. In the meeting of the narrator who has ditched his plane in the Sahara desert, and the little prince, who has dropped there through time and space from his tiny asteroid, comes an intersection of two worlds, the one governed by the laws of nature, and the other determined only by the limits of imagination. The world of the imagination wins hands down, with the concerns of the adult world often shown to be lamentably silly as seen through the eyes of the little prince. While adult readers can find deep meanings in his various encounters, they can also be charmed back to childhood by this wise but innocent infant. This popular translation contains the author’s own delightful illustrations, bringing to visual life the small being at the tale’s heart, and a world of fantasy far removed from any quotidian reality. It is also a sort of love story, in which two frail beings, the downed pilot and the wandering infant-prince who has left behind all he knows, share their short time together isolated from humanity and finding sustenance in each other. This is a book which creates a unique relationship with each reader, whether child or adult.

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'Who could read the programme for the excursion without longing to make one of the party?' So Mark Twain acclaims his voyage from New York City to Europe and the Holy Land in June 1867. His adventures produced The Innocents Abroad, a book so funny and provocative it made him an international star for the rest of his life. He was making his first responses to the Old World - to Paris, Milan, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, Constantinople, Sebastopol, Balaklava, Damascus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. For the first time he was seeing the great paintings and sculptures of the 'Old Masters'. He responded with wonder and amazement, but also with exasperation, irritation, disbelief. Above all he displayed the great energy of his humour, more explosive for us now than for his beguiled contemporaries.

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With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies. 'I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with horror which at all times assails me yet'. With its strange, imaginative blend of horror, science fiction, romance and lyrical prose, Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow is a classic masterpiece of weird fiction. This series of vaguely connected stories is linked by the presence of a monstrous and suppressed book which brings fright, madness and spectral tragedy to all those who read it. An air of futility and doom pervade these pages like a sweet insidious poison. Dare you read it? This collection has been called the most important book in American supernatural fiction between Poe and the moderns. H. P. Lovecraft, creator of the famed Cthulu mythos, whose own fiction was greatly influenced by this book stated that The King in Yellow 'achieves notable heights of cosmic fear'.

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Little Women is one of the best-loved children's stories of all time, based on the author's own youthful experiences. It describes the family of the four March sisters living in a small New England community. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and wishes to be a lady; Jo, at fifteen is ungainly and unconventional with an ambition to be an author; Beth is a delicate child of thirteen with a taste for music and Amy is a blonde beauty of twelve. The story of their domestic adventures, their attempts to increase the family income, their friendship with the neighbouring Laurence family, and their later love affairs remains as fresh and beguiling as ever.

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Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a break with the traditional novel form and reflects a genuine humanity and a concern with the experiences that both enrich and stultify existence. Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party. Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers gradually reveal the characters of the central protagonists. Clarissa's life is touched by tragedy as the events in her day run parallel to those of Septimus Warren Smith, whose madness escalates as his life draws toward inevitable suicide.

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Translated by Irene Testot-Ferry. The Little Prince is a classic tale of equal appeal to children and adults. On one level it is the story of an airman's discovery, in the desert, of a small boy from another planet - the Little Prince of the title - and his stories of intergalactic travel, while on the other hand it is a thought-provoking allegory of the human condition. First published in 1943, the year before the author's death in action, this translation contains Saint-Exupery's delightful illustrations.

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Translated by Lee M. Hollander, with an Introduction by Thorsteinn Gylfason.Njal''s Saga is the finest of the Icelandic sagas, and one of the world''s greatest prose works. Written c.1280, about events a couple of centuries earlier, it is divided into three parts: the first recounts the touching friendship between noble Gunnar and the statesman Njal, together with the fatal enmity between their wives. The second part works out the central tragedy of the saga, while the third describes the retribution wrought by Flosi and Kari.The saga is remarkable not only for the details of everyday life - the farming, the feasting and the charcoal-burning - but also for the social structure of the society in which that life took place - the Althing or Parliament, the lawmaking and the lawgiving. The grandeur of the narrative and the beauty and distinction of the characters mark Njal''s Saga as an essential text for all wh

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With an Introduction and Notes by Keith Wren, University of Kent at Canterbury. The story of Edmund Dantes, self-styled Count of Monte Cristo, is told with consummate skill. The victim of a miscarriage of justice, Dantes is fired by a desire for retribution and empowered by a stroke of providence. In his campaign of vengeance, he becomes an anonymous agent of fate. The sensational narrative of intrigue, betrayal, escape, and triumphant revenge moves at a cracking pace. Dumas' novel presents a powerful conflict between good and evil embodied in an epic saga of rich diversity that is complicated by the hero's ultimate discomfort with the hubristic implication of his own actions. Our edition is based on the most popular and enduring translation first published by Chapman and Hall in 1846. The name of the translator was never revealed.

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Jane Austen is without question, one of England's most enduring and skilled novelists. With her wit, social precision, and unerring ability to create some of literature's most charismatic and believable heroines, she mesmerises her readers as much today as when her novels were first published. Whether it is her sharp, ironic gaze at the Gothic genre invoked by the adventures of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey; the diffident and much put-upon Fanny Price struggling to cope with her emotions in Mansfield Park; her delightfully paced comedy of manners and the machinations of the sisters Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility; the quiet strength of Anne Elliot in Persuasion succeeding in a world designed to subjugate her very existence; and Emma - 'a heroine whom no one but myself will like' teased Austen - yet another irresistible character on fire with imagination and foresight. Indeed not unlike her renowned creator. Jane Austen is as sure-footed in her steps through society's whirlpools of convention and prosaic mores as she is in her sometimes restrained but ever precise and enduring prose.

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With an introduction by Dr. Laurence Marlow. A spectre is haunting Europe (and the world). Not, in the twenty-first century, the spectre of communism, but the spectre of capitalism. Marx's prediction that the state would wither away of its own accord has proved inaccurate, and he did not foresee the tyrannies which have ruled large parts of the globe in his name. Indeed, he would have been appalled if he had witnessed them. But his analysis of the evils and dangers of raw capitalism is as correct now as when it was written, and some of his suggestions (progressive income tax, abolition of child labour, free education for all children) are now accepted with little question. In a world where capitalism is no longer held in check by fear of a communist alternative, The Communist Manifesto (with Socialism Utopian and Scientific, Engels's brief and clear exposition of Marxist thought) is essential reading. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 is Engels's first, and probably best-known, book. With Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, it was and is the outstanding study of the working class in Victorian England.

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A new version of John Payne's Victorian translation, with an Introduction by Cormac O Cuilleanain. 1348. The Black Death is sweeping through Europe. In Florence, plague has carried off one hundred thousand people. In their Tuscan villas, seven young women and three young men tell tales to recreate the world they have lost, weaving a rich tapestry of comedy, tragedy, ribaldry and farce. Boccaccio's Decameron recasts the storytelling heritage of the ancient and medieval worlds into perennial forms that inspired writers from Chaucer and Shakespeare down to our own day. Boccaccio makes the incredible believable, with detail so sharp we can look straight into the lives of people who lived six hundred years ago. His Decameron hovers between the fading glories of an aristocratic past - the Crusades, the Angevins, the courts of France, the legendary East - and the colourful squalor of contemporary life, where wives deceive husbands, friars and monks pursue fleshly ends, and natural instincts fight for satisfaction. Here are love and jealousy, passion and pride - and a shrewd calculation of profit and loss which heralds the rise of a dynamic merchant class. These stories show us early capitalism during a moment of crisis and revelation.

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Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was born in Odense, the son of a shoemaker. His early life was wretched, but he was adopted by a patron and became a short-story writer, novelist and playwright, though he remains best-known for his magical fairy tales which were published between 1835 and 1872.For 150 years his stories have been delighting both adults and children. Packed with a light-hearted whimsy combined with a mature wisdom they are as entrancing as ever. Here are all of Andersen's 154 tales, and among the favourites are The Red Shoes, The Mermaid, The Real Princess, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Tinder Box and of course The Ugly Duckling.

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The two American classics here together in one volume, Little Men and Jo's Boys, are worthy sequels to Little Women, one of the best-loved children's stories of all time, and its continuation, Good Wives. In Little Men, Louisa May Alcott takes up the story of the everyday dramas and exploits of the naughty but easy-going boys at Plumfield, now a boarding-school run by Professor Bhaer and his lovable madcap wife Jo, the most fiery and free-spirited of the four March sisters. Jo's Boys revisits the one-time members of that 'wilderness of boys' ten years later when they are making their ways in the world with varying degrees of triumph and disaster.

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With an Introduction by Dr Pamela Knights, Department of English Studies, Durham University. With this intensely moving short novel, Edith Wharton set out ‘to draw life as it really was’ in the lonely villages and desolate farms of the harsh New England mountains. Through the eyes of a visitor from the city, trapped for a winter in snowbound Starkfield, readers glimpse the hidden histories of this austere and beautiful land. Piecing together the story of monosyllabic Ethan Frome, his grim wife, Zeena, and Mattie Silver, her charming cousin, Wharton explores psychological dead-lock:frustration, longing, resentment, passion. First published in 1911, the novella stunned its public with its consummate handling of the unfolding drama, and has remained for many readers the most compelling and subtle of all Wharton’s fiction.

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Introduction and Notes by Janet Beer, Manchester Metropolitan University. The House of Mirth tells the story of Lily Bart, aged 29, beautiful, impoverished and in need of a rich husband to safeguard her place in the social elite, and to support her expensive habits - her clothes, her charities and her gambling. Unwilling to marry without both love and money, Lily becomes vulnerable to the kind of gossip and slander which attach to a girl who has been on the marriage market for too long. Wharton charts the course of Lily's life, providing, along the way, a wider picture of a society in transition, a rapidly changing New York where the old certainties of manners, morals and family have disappeared and the individual has become an expendable commodity. The House of Mirth was published in October 1905 to widespread critical acclaim. It became an instant bestseller and is regarded today as one of Edith Wharton’s most accomplished and compelling social satires.

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With an Introduction and Notes by Dr T.C.B.Cook. Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, commonly regarded as amongst the greatest novels ever written. He also, however, wrote many masterly short stories, and this volume contains four of the longest and best in distinguished translations that have stood the test of time. In the early story Family Happiness, Tolstoy explores courtship and marriage from the point of view of a young wife. In The Kreutzer Sonata he gives us a terrifying study of marital breakdown, in The Devil a powerful depiction of the power of sexual temptation, and, in perhaps the finest of all, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, he portrays the long agony of a man gradually coming to terms with his own mortality. This volume also includes an Introduction and Notes written specially for this Wordsworth edition by Dr Tim Cook, formely lecturer in literature at the Universities of Kingston and Ulster. Previous work contributed by Dr Cook for Wordsworth includes an introduction and notes to Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby.

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With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue Elizabeth Barrett Browning was such an acclaimed poet in her own lifetime that she was suggested as a candidate for the Poet Laureateship when Wordsworth died in 1850. Yet today we have only a limited knowledge of her considerable life’s work as a poet, in part because of a lack of representative but accessible editions of her work. Readers will find here not only her well-known sonnet sequence of love poems, Sonnets From the Portuguese, but also lesser known sonnets, some in praise of the cross-dressing bohemian writer George Sand, others to contemporary poets and artists. Her religious and spiritual poetry echoes that of the Metaphysical poets. A different voice emerges in her social and political protest poems, such as ‘The Cry of the Children’ and ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’. Her experimental ballads allowed her to develop a distinctive way of writing about women within an apparently conventional form. In the outstanding work of her maturity, Aurora Leigh, the woman’s voice takes centre stage. This ‘novel-poem’ is full of verve and interest, with a female poet-hero who casts a caustic eye on life and on her fellow men – and women. We all think we know the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning – the mysterious illness which enclosed her in her room, her over-loving but imperious father, and her romantic, secret marriage to the poet Robert Browning and their life together in Italy. But this comprehensive selection of her poetry tells the real story of her sustained creative life as a poet, which began with her childhood poetic ambitions and ended only with her death. All the major aspects of her poetry are represented in this accessible edition which is well-annotated and contextualised, with a wide-ranging introduction which covers Barrett Browning’s poetic and intellectual life as well as her personal one. Recent critical re-readings, including major feminist reassessments, of her poetry are covered in the introduction, with helpful suggestions for further reading.

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