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When the publishers of the Pickwick Papers, Chapman & Hall, brought out the anonymous ‘Sketches of Young Ladies’ in 1837, their resounding success prompted the twenty-six-year old Dickens to write, the following year, a companion piece, the ‘Sketches of Young Gentlemen’, followed two years later – to coincide with the engagement of Princess Victoria and Prince Albert – by the ‘Sketches of Young Couples’. First published in a single volume in 1843, and including the iconic original engravings by Phiz, these satirical portraits not only reveal the dazzling brilliance of young Dickens’s genius, but also offer a humorous glimpse into Victorian mores and attitudes.

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Although he is best known to the public as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories and other pioneering works of detective fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle successfully contributed to other genres, such as historical fiction, as demonstrated by this collection he compiled in 1922. These vivid and enthralling stories – which take the reader to Roman Britain, ancient Carthage, Mecca at the time of the Prophet Muhammad and many other evocative settings – showcase the author’s knack for bringing to life diverse times and places and crafting enduring narratives. Tales of Long Ago is an entertaining and invaluable read for all those interested in this lesser-known facet of Conan Doyle’s writing.

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Beautiful Emma Rouault yearns for the life of wealth, passion and romance she has encountered in popular sentimental fiction, and when her doctor, the well-meaning but awkward and unremarkable Charles Bovary, begins to pay her attention, she imagines that she may be granted her wish. However, after their marriage, Emma soon becomes frustrated with the boredom of provincial life and finds herself seeking escape and contemplating adultery. As Emma’s efforts to make a reality of her fantasies become more dangerous, both she and those around her must face the shattering consequences of her actions. Causing widespread scandal when it was published in 1857, Madame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece and one of the landmark works of nineteenth-century realist fiction.

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"This second volume of plays by Georg Kaiser contains five plays ranging from his early work through the time of his prolific maturity in the 1920s to his last period as an exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1945. David and Goliath is set in Denmark and deals with the power of money over men. The President, set in France, is ironical in tone and revolves around a lottery and, once again, the power of money. The Flight to Venice was written at the height of the Expressionist movement in 1922, and is one of the principal plays of the period. One Day in October is highly complex, using nineteenth-century French literary personalities to make points about literary creation and the relationship between art and life. The final play, The Raft of the Medusa, takes its title from Gericault’s painting, and concerns the regeneration of man overlaid with the pessimism of the European struggle."

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These Opera Guides are ideal com-panions to the opera. They provide stimulating introductory articles together with the complete text of each opera in English and the original. This famous opera ends, after the hero is dragged down to hell, with a warning that evil shall not go unpunished. ‘Hardly’, as Michael F. Robinson notes, ‘one’s usual idea of a “comic” subject!’ So this guide opens with a brief look at what is actually comic about it. David Wyn Jones gives an overall view of the score: he shows how the musical keys are arranged so that the dramatic momentum over two long acts is maintained and discusses orchestration and dramatic pacing in the most important scenes. Christopher Raeburn contributes a lively portrait of the ‘libertine librettist’ who, after his Vienna triumphs, was hounded out of London for his debts and eventually died in New York – ‘revered as the father of Italian studies in America’. The full original text is given, with a pointed modern translation.

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These Opera Guides are ideal com-panions to the opera. They provide stimulating introductory articles together with the complete text of each opera in English and the original. Italian opera expert William Ashbrook asks why this love story attracted new audiences to the opera house when it was first performed, and what gives this 'tragedy of fragile sentiment' such an enduring appeal. Neither subject nor score is conventional, yet the sound picture is bound together with a quickness and lightness of touch that the young composer learnt from the eighty-year-old Verdi, whose Falstaff was premiered while La boheme was being conceived. Joanna Richardson surveys the actual Bohemians who inspired, or at least unwittingly supplied the raw material for, Murger's book on which the story is based. Edward Greenfield and Nicholas John examine the subtleties of this best-loved of operas and the merits of a libretto which took Italy's best librettists over three years to finish.

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'See how the drama is turned into laughter,' comment the chorus, as they witness the destruction of a marriage and a friendship. Here Pierluigi Petrobelli shows how the irony woven into the tragedy (which strikes listeners today as so modern) results from the meeting of French and Italian operatic traditions. Is this really a ridiculous libretto irredeemably mangled by a censorship which demanded that Enlightenment Sweden had to become seventeenth-century Boston? Or is it Verdi's finest achievement, with its perfectly symmetrical drama and beautiful variety? Since it dates from a time when Verdi and his librettist were actively drafting an operatic treatment of King Lear, it is not surprising to find that Un ballo in maschera echoes some of the themes in Shakespeare's tragedy. Benedict Sarnaker analyses the extended love duet - the kernel of the score, and the pivot of the action. In a detailed study of the musical structure of the great Act Two finale, Harold Powers looks at the laughingA" chorus and at the quicksilver character of Oscar, unique in Verdi's work. Three detailed essays introduce one of the most debated classics in Italian opera.

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These Opera Guides are ideal companions to the opera. They provide stimulating introductory articles together with the complete text of each opera in English and the original. More than any other work in the operatic repertory, Parsifal demands a personal commitment and response. As the culmination of half a lifetime’s preoccupation with the issues of compassion and redemption, it has profound philosophical implications. As the ultimate example of Wagner’s idiom it is an extraordinary musical structure. The unique quality of the subject inspired a wholly original musical conception. Here are four very different essays designed, in their variety, to set you thinking about it what it means to you. The translation was commissioned for the first production by English National Opera in 1986. Contains: A Very Human Epic Mike Ashman Recapitulation of a Lifetime Dieter Borchmeyer Experiencing Music and Imagery in ‘Parsifal’ Robin Holloway ‘Parsifal’: Words and Music Carolyn Abbate Discussions into the Dramaturgy of ‘Parsifal’ Gerd Rienäcker Thematic Guide Lionel Friend ‘Parsifal’ poem by Richard Wagner ‘Parsifal’ English translation by Andrew Porter Discography Cathy Peterson Bibliography

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Rigoletto was first produced at the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, in 1851, and is generally seen as marking the beginning of Giuseppe Verdi’s extraordinary middle period. It was followed in quick succession by Il trovatore and La traviata, and even after the great success of these two works Verdi regarded it as his ‘best opera’ up to that time. Based on Victor Hugo’s play Le Roi s’amuse, which was banned after its premiere in Paris in 1832, the opera faced considerable difficulties with local censors before performance was permitted. In the story of the hunchbacked court jester and his beloved daughter, Verdi believed he had found “the greatest subject and perhaps the greatest drama of modern times”. The guide contains articles on the place of Rigoletto in Verdi’s oeuvre and the background to its composition, a detailed examination of its musical structure and a survey of its performance history including discussions of some of its most distinguished interpreters. A further article highlights aspects of the opera’s particularly Italian character. The guide also includes the full Italian libretto with English translation, sixteen pages of illustrations, a musical thematic guide, a bibliography and discography, and DVD and website guides. Contains: The Making of Rigoletto, Jonathan Keates The Music of Rigoletto, Roger Parker A Selective Performance History, George Hall Rigoletto: Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave after Victor Hugo’s play Le Roi s’amuse Rigoletto: English Translation by William Weaver

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In this Guide to Pelleas and Melisande, Maeterlinck's original play is reprinted in full, so that the opera lover can read the scenes that Debussy did not set to music. Hugh Macdonald's much praised English translation is published here for the first time, with an essay uncovering the musical roots of Pelleas and Melisande and illustrating its importance to the music of the twentieth century. Alain Raitt, author of several studies of Symbolist writers, evaluates Maeterlinck's status as a dramatist, and Roger Nichols analyses the score. Proust's short pastiche of the opera and Arthur Symons's review of the first English performances challenge us to come to terms with this eternally intriguing masterpiece.

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“A lyric comedy unlike any other”, wrote Verdi about his last opera. That the last work of a composer who was almost notorious for his preference for tragic and gloomy subjects should be a brilliant human comedy was and remains one of the wonders of music. Michael Rose considers its status in Italian comic opera tradition. Davis Cairns pours his enthusiasm for the piece into a detailed and illuminating musical analysis. Andrew Porter, whose translation almost matches Boito’s original libretto for elegance and wit, explains the challenges and risks of the undertaking in his fascinating introduction. Contents: Introduction, Nicholas John; ‘A Lyric Comedy Unlike Any Other’, Michael Rose; ‘Full of Nimble, Fiery and Delectable Shapes’, David Cairns; Translating ‘Falstaff’, Andrew Porter; Falstaff: Libretto by Arrigo Boito; Falstaff: English Translation by Andrew Porter

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‘The Wallace’ is a historical play dramatizing the life of one of Scotland’s greatest heroes, William Wallace, whose revolt against England in the early fourteenth century led to his capture and execution, but, also through the continuing and successful rebellion of his successor, Robert the Bruce, to eventual Scottish independence. The author is revealed not only as a major dramatic poet, but as a chronicler of history. The work carries an excitement and emotional charge that can infect an audience with the author’s own concern for freedom and justice.

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After one of their own people repeatedly fails to live up to a pact with the Devil, a petty and morally bankrupt village community is plagued by a swarm of deadly black spiders. Using a complex narrative structure, Gotthelf's cautionary novella shrewdly dissects the iniquitous social dynamics of rural life.First published in 1842, The Black Spider displays its author's talent for dark satire and realism, as well as the visionary powers of his imagination.

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"After years of fierce battle, the Emperor Charlemagne’s army is finally on the brink of victory over the Saracens in Spain. Having proposed his stepfather Ganelon for the perilous task of serving as Charlemagne’s envoy in the negotiations over the surrender of the Saracen king Marsile, Count Roland gets a taste of his own medicine when, with peace secured, Ganelon suggests that Roland should lead the rearguard of the army on the difficult return journey over the mountain passes to France. Yet Marsile’s forces are massing, and Roland is unaware of just how deep Ganelon’s treachery runs. Probably written around three centuries after the events it describes, The Song of Roland is the earliest and finest example of the French chansons de geste – verse epics that celebrated heroic deeds and were sung or recited by wandering minstrels. Presented here along with the original Anglo-Norman French, this sparkling new translation by Anthony Mortimer offers the modern reader both an engrossing narrative and a compelling insight into the medieval value system."

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Charles Dickens's second novel is the tale of a young orphan who faces the gruelling conditions of a Victorian workhouse before finding himself sucked into the criminal underworld of London. Teeming with unforgettable characters such as the villainous Fagin, the virtuous Nancy and the brutal Bill Sikes, Oliver Twist combines dark humour, elements of melodrama and social polemic. At once a ferocious indictment of the author's era and a timeless story of coming of age, this classic has enthralled readers and inspired countless adaptations and imitations since it was first published in 1838.

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On 17th September 1820, accompanied by his friend Joseph Severn, John Keats left London for Italy on board the Maria Crowther in a desperate bid to restore his health. Anguished at the thought of having to part, possibly for ever, from his fiancée and his friends, troubled by money worries and broken in body and mind, the young poet launched on his last journey on earth with both a sense of hope and a deep foreboding that his efforts would be in vain. Despite Keats's own assertion that by then he no longer felt a citizen of the world and was leading a posthumous life, his final five months were filled with events of great biographical interest, and deserve to be examined much more carefully. Using exclusively primary sources and first-hand accounts, Keats's editor and translator Alessandro Gallenzi has pieced together all the available material adding newly discovered and previously unpublished documents to help the reader follow the poet step by step from his departure and tumultu

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The founding father of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin has exerted - through his novel in verse Eugene Onegin, his plays, his short stories and his narrative poetry - a long-lasting influence well beyond the borders of his motherland. A slightly lesser-known, but by no mean less important aspect of his writing is his vast production of shorter verse, a genre at which he excelled and arguably still remains unsurpassed. This volume, part of Alma's series of the complete poetic works of Alexander Pushkin, collects the poems Pushkin wrote while still a young student at the mperial Lyceum in Tsarkoe Selo and includes such early gems as `The Tear', `The Singer' and `Note on a Hospital Wall', each presented in a verse translation opposite the original Russian text. Enriched with notes, pictures and an appendix on Pushkin's life and works, this will be essential reading for anyone wishing to delve deeper into the Russian bard's genius.

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A first-person diary of a prisoner's final day before being executed for an unspecified crime, Victor Hugo's poignant tale vividly conveys the mental anguish of a man confronted with the intransigent mechanism of justice, as his mind seeks refuge in recollections from his past and philosophical musings on his inevitable fate. As relevant today as when it was first published in 1829, The Last Day of a Condemned Man is an eloquent plea for compassion and a masterpiece of realist fiction. This edition includes the Preface to the 1832 edition of the book, a manifest of Hugo's personal opinions, 'A Comedy about a Tragedy' and 'Claude Gueux', an early example of "true crime" fiction.

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Despite hailing from a comfortable family background, budding poet Gordon Comstock decides to declare war on money and all the middle-class trappings that wealth can buy. Working in a small bookshop and living in a bedsit in London, he dreams of completing an ambitious poem in rhyme royal and devoting his life to literature. But when poverty begins to damage his self-esteem and taint his worldview, and his romantic and professional lives start falling apart, will Gordon be able to uphold his anti-money principles, or will he succumb to the lure of lucre and everything he stands against? First published in 1936, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is the author’s third novel, and one of his most outspoken works of social criticism. Partly autobiographical, it sits alongside Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four as a reminder of Orwell’s lucid narrative style and his abilities as a politically and socially engaged writer.

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Compiled and published after Fitzgerald's death by his friend, the prominent critic and editor Edmund Wilson, The Crack-Up is a collection of writings that chronicle the author's state of mind and personal perspective on events, fellow writers and public figures of the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to articles and essays such as the celebrated title piece, this volume includes a selection of Fitzgerald's notebooks, which - as well as being a repository of anecdotes and witty lines - provide a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse into the novelist's creative process, with passages that would be reworked into his fiction.

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True Story, Lucian’s best-known and most entertaining work, is a parody of the tall stories of fantastic journeys narrated by famous poets and historians. With his trademark wit and humour, Lucian informs his readers that he means to tell nothing but lies and impossibilities, and warns them not to believe a word he says. The result is a comical masterpiece that influenced Western literature throughout the centuries, and works such as Gulliver’s Travels and The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Lucius, or the Ass, a satirical novel charting the adventures of a young man who has been transformed into a donkey, is usually attributed to Lucian and is thought to be a source of Apuleius’s Golden Ass.

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This trilogy of short novels, taken as a whole, recounts the young narrator’s early life up to his university days, each episode told through the perceptions, points of view and emotions felt by the protagonist at the time. Based on Tolstoy’s own life and experiences, this fictionalized account of a young man growing into the world combines anecdote with frank personal assessment and philosophical extrapolation, as the author’s Stendhalian take on the confessional genre confronts and blurs the notions of reality and imagination. Tolstoy’s first published work, which launched him on a successful writing career, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth – besides offering an early display of his storytelling and stylistic abilities – provides the reader with invaluable insight into the personal and literary development of one of the greatest writers of all time."

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Mozart wrote Idomeneo when he was twenty-four years old, and the opera was described by Albert Einstein as ‘one of those works that even a genius like Mozart could write only once in his life’. It is one of most astonishing achievements of an altogether astonishing career. In this newly commissioned guide, Julian Rushton explains the special nature of the music in a detailed analysis of its themes and development, while Nicholas Till places the opera in its context as an expression of the Enlightenment. Gary Kahn explores the performance history of an opera which, although largely ignored for over a hundred and fifty years, has now taken its place as part of the international operatic repertoire. A selection of the unique letters between Mozart and his father written during the opera’s composition is also included.

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How can other people like the books we don’t like? What benefit can we get from rereading a work? Can we read better? If so, how? These and many other questions, ranging from the field of writing to that of reading and translation, are given a comprehensive answer in a series of stimulating and challenging literary essays that will be a perfect read for all book explorers and practitioners of the pen. After delighting us with his novels and many volumes of non-fiction, Tim Parks – who is not only an acclaimed author and a translator, but also a celebrated literary essayist – gives us a book to enjoy, savour and, most importantly, reread.

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Using the credit card and identity of a handcuffs salesman, professional failure Tyndale Corbett arrives in Miami for a law enforcement conference to discover the joys of luxury hotels and above all the delight of being someone else, someone successful.

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White Truffles in Winter imagines the world of the remarkable French chef Auguste Escoffier, who changed the way we eat through his legendary restaurants at the Savoy and the Ritz. A man of contradictions – kind yet imperious, food-obsessed yet rarely hungry – Escoffier was also torn between two women: the famous, beautiful and reckless actress Sarah Bernhardt and his wife, the independent and sublime poet Delphine Daffis. In the last year of his life, he returns to Delphine, who requests a dish in her name in the same way as he has honoured Bernhardt, Queen Victoria and many others. But how can even the best chef in the world define the complexity of love on a single plate? N.M. Kelby brings us the sensuality of food and love amid a world on the verge of war in this work that shimmers with beauty and longing.

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A great collection to include Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet. All the books contain extra material for your readers, a glossary and a test yourself section.

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In this volume of typographical (or “concrete”) poems, Alan Riddell weaves words and the very letters they’re made of into shapes and patterns that heighten or, in some cases, completely undermine the professed message of the pieces. When Eclipse was first published in 1972, concrete poetry was still a relatively new art form, and this book was the first substantial one-man collection to be published in Britain. Now, almost fifty years since its inception, this volume provides a unique perspective on this cutting-edge technique.

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First published in 1939, a few years before his most influential works in theatre and philosophy, The Wall was Sartre’s first and only collection of short fiction. The title piece tells the story of a prisoner during the Spanish Civil War, on the eve of his execution by a firing squad, who is told he will be spared if he can betray the whereabouts of a fellow Republican. This leads him to question his cause and his loyalty, as the mental torment that he and two other inmates endure unfolds in unflinching detail. This collection, which also includes ‘The Bedoom’, ‘Herostratus’ and ‘Intimacy’ – short psychological tales in which individuals grapple with questions of madness, sexuality and death – as well as ‘The Childhood of a Leader’, the extended chronicle of a young man’s emotional deterioration and embrace of Fascism, provides a fascinating and accessible introduction to the author who would become the figurehead of Existentialism.

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As Mabel Waring takes off her cloak and steps into the drawing room of Clarissa Dalloway, she immediately realizes that something is not right: her pale-yellow silk dress, which she has had specially made for the occasion, is clearly old-fashioned, dowdy and out of place. Everyone seems to be looking at her in dismay or mocking her appearance. Crushed at once by her insecurity, Mabel is pervaded by a sense of selfloathing, and feels utter revulsion for the social world she has tried so hard to impress. Written in 1924 and perhaps intended for inclusion in Mrs Dalloway, a book Woolf was working on at the time, The New Dress is here accompanied by most of the short stories she published in her lifetime, as well as six posthumously published pieces that share the milieu and some of the characters of her celebrated novel. Together, they reveal their author as one of the finest practitioners in the field of short fiction.

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When the immoral libertine Monsieur de Franval marries and fathers a daughter, he decides to inculcate in her a sense of absolute freedom, an unconventional education that involves the two becoming secret lovers. But Franval's virtuous, God-fearing wife becomes suspicious and confronts him, setting off a tragic chain of events. Part of Sade's The Crimes of Love cycle, this shocking tale - which was among the writings banned for publication until the twentieth century - tests the limits of morality and portrays the disastrous consequences of freedom and pleasure.

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It is a variable early summer's day, and there is an unusual bustle in the grounds of Pointz Hall, a country house in a remote village in the very heart of England. The local community is all astir, intent on putting the finishing touches to preparations for the annual pageant, which is to be performed there that evening. Among the medley of attendees are Mr Oliver, the owner of the house, the flirtatious Mrs Manresa and her friend William Dodge, who is rumoured to be homosexual, the troubled married couple Giles and Isa, as well as the eccentric spinster Miss La Trobe, the author of the pageant - an ambitious journey through England's past and literature. Highly symbolic, and dealing with many of the themes that were most dear to Virginia Woolf, such as the condition of the individual in the current of history, sexual ambiguity and the tension between life and art, Between the Acts was the author's final novel, offering a tantalising glimpse of the direction her fiction might have taken.

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The undisputed pioneer of the horror, detective and science-fiction genres, Edgar Allan Poe was an accomplished poet as well as a celebrated writer of short stories. The present edition contains all of his works in verse, from the major poems of his maturity – such as his famous ballads ‘The Raven’ and ‘Lenore’ – to those he published in his youth and those that were collected immediately after his premature death in 1849. Also included in this volume is a selection of Poe’s essays on poetical composition and prosody, revealing that poetry was at the core of the American master’s vision of literature – something also demonstrated by the significant and enduring body of work he left behind in this field.

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An impoverished member of the privileged high society of old New York, Lily Bart is beautiful and socially agreeable, but she is almost thirty and still unmarried. Now she is keen to secure a wealthy husband to confirm her status, but the debts she contracts at the card table, her reduced circumstances and the constant gossip she attracts from malevolent tongues through her heedless behaviour and faux pas make her prospects look bleak. As suitor after suitor appears and fades away, and she is drawn further and further down a spiral of loneliness and unhappiness, she realizes that she is just one step away from losing everything she has. Published in 1905 to immediate critical and commercial success, Edith Wharton’s enduringly popular novel of manners is a brilliant evocation of the economic and social changes wrought by the Gilded Age, as well as a universal satire on the constraints and follies of upper-crust conventions.

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Simplicius Simplicissimus - the towering achievement of H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen, one of the earliest novelists in the German language - charts the adventures of its hero, Simplicius, through the horrors of battle, murder, fire and famine, offering an invaluable eyewitness account of the Thirty Years' War and showing how humanity can, in the end, triumph over brutality A work of great poetical beauty and satirical strength, and a lasting historical document of timeless value, Simplicius Simplicissimus is one of the greatest picaresque novels in the Western canon.

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It is 1880: after visiting his mistress in the London suburbs, Colonel Pargiter returns home to his children and his dying wife. In a series of snapshots we meet all the Pargiter siblings: twenty-year-old Eleanor, whose concern is to help the poor; her younger sisters Milly, Delia and Rose; her brothers Morris, Martin and Edward, who is at Oxford and in love with his cousin Kitty. As the years unfold, the various threads of relation, history and personal experience are woven into the tapestries of the characters’ lives, forming a larger canvas that covers not only the story of a family, but that of two entire generations. The most ambitious of Woolf ’s novels, and the last one to be published during her lifetime, The Years is a work suff used with a haunting, melancholy sense of time and history, and a stylistic tour de force.

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When the adventurer Allan Quatermain is asked by Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good to help them find Sir Henry’s missing brother, who was last seen trekking into the remote African interior in search of the fabled King Solomon’s Mines, he reluctantly agrees, yet fears that there is little hope of coming back alive. Following a map drawn in blood, the men cross vast deserts and scale snow-covered mountain peaks, facing fearful dangers and hardships, until they reach Kukuanaland, where they meet their greatest peril yet… This new edition contains extra material for young readers, including section on ‘Other Adventure Stories’, a test yourself quiz and a glossary.

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When Buck is smuggled from his beloved home in the Santa Clara Valley and forced to work as a sled-dog in the frozen wilderness of the Yukon, he must forget the long, lazy Californian days and face a life of constant toil and danger under the whip of cruel or inept masters, where survival itself must be fought for. But with his primal instincts stirred, how long can Buck resist the call of the wild? Set at the time of the Klondike Gold Rush, The Call of the Wild is one of the greatest evocations of the natural world, and perhaps the best example of London’s famously urgent and vivid style. This edition also includes ‘Brown Wolf’, ‘That Spot’ and ‘To Build a Fire’ – three Yukon tales that demonstrate London’s mastery of the short-story genre.

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As Paris is shaken by a spate of murderous robberies, the aristocratic Mademoiselle de Scuderi pens a poem to poke fun at the cowardly lovers who now fear to go out at night to see their mistresses. But when she receives an unexpected visit from a young man, who gives her a box of jewels with a note thanking her for supporting the robbers' cause, the elderly writer is plunged into a dangerous web of passion, intrigue and murder. First published in 1819 to great acclaim, and displaying all the author's trademark wit and ingenuity, E.T.A. Hoffmann's tale has inspired and delighted writers and readers ever since, and remains a benchmark for all modern crime novels.

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While spending the summer in the resort of Grand Isle with her husband and children, Edna Pontellier begins a process of self-discovery that is accelerated after she meets the charming Robert Lebrun. Yet, when Robert departs for Mexico and the summer vacation ends, Edna’s new-found sense of independence and personal freedom mean that she isolates herself from New Orleans society and rejects her former lifestyle. Moving into a home of her own and choosing a lover, Edna soon becomes a protégée of the unconventional pianist Mademoiselle Reisz, through whom she learns that Robert still longs for her. Centring upon the conflict between Edna’s increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood and the prevailing social attitudes of the fin de siècle American South, The Awakening is widely seen as a landmark of early feminism and a precursor of American modernism.

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"One of the most famous and celebrated Victorian coming-of-age novels, David Copperfield charts the adventures and vicissitudes of its eponymous hero’s life, from the misery of his childhood after his mother’s marriage to the tyrannical Mr Murdstone, through to his first steps as a writer and his search for love and happiness. Along the way he encounters a vast array of gloriously vivid characters – many of whom number among the most memorable in literature – such as the eccentric aunt Betsey Trotwood, the eloquent debtor Wilkins Micawber and the obsequious villain Uriah Heep. Replete with comedy and tragedy in equal measure, and cited by Dickens as “his favourite child"", this partially autobiographical work provides tantalizing glimpses into Dickens’s own childhood and remains one of the most enduringly popular novels in the English language."

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Of unknown date, and surviving in a tenth-century manuscript, Beowulf is the tale of a young Geatish hero and his struggle with three deadly foes, beginning with the dread monster Grendel, who has been devouring warriors in the hall of the Danish King in their sleep. The most important Old English poem, and the first known major poem written in a European vernacular, Beowulf is a unique and compelling mix of sixth-century historical events, Christian commentary, Germanic myth and Anglo-Saxon culture. The poem is presented here in a dual-text format with a new translation by multi-award-winning translator J.G. Nichols.

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Famed for having killed his cousin Alessandro, the Duke of Florence, in 1537, but also for writing accomplished literary works, including a comedy and several poems, Lorenzino de’ Medici remains one of the most enigmatic figures of Italian literature. In his masterpiece, Apology for a Murder, he reveals the inner motives behind his act, portraying himself as a hero to be numbered alongside the great tyrannicides of ancient Rome and Greece. Lorenzino himself, in 1548, was murdered by two soldiers hired either by the emperor Charles V or by Cosimo, Alessandro’s successor as Duke, and this volume includes the dramatic account of his killing by Francesco Bibboni, one of the assassins, as well as a selection of Lorenzino’s poems, giving a fully rounded image of the antihero of Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio.

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Through a series of connected monologues, The Waves tells the story of six very different friends – Bernard, Louis, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda – as they progress from childhood to middle age. Interspersed with evocative descriptions of the seaside at different times of day, the poignant personal histories coalesce into a poetic tapestry of human experience. A commercial and critical success when it was first published in 1931, and now considered by some to be Virginia Woolf’s most ambitious novel, showcasing her Modernist narrative techniques at their finest, The Waves casts a visionary and lyrical light on everyday life.

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