Classics

With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies. Father Brown, one of the most quirkily genial and lovable characters to emerge from English detective fiction, first made his appearance in The Innocence of Father Brown in 1911. That f…

This is the first paperback edition to bring out in one volume Kate Chopin's extraordinary novel The Awakening (1899), along with the complete text of her two collections of short stories, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (…

Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue, Canterbury Christ Church University College. Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outward…

Introduction and Notes by Elaine Jordan, Reader in Literature, University of Essex. What does persuasion mean - a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quietest he…

Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent. Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. …

With an Introduction, explanatory notes, and annotated bibliography by Nicholas Seager. This collection brings together Jane Austen's earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of he…

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', Em…

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 diffide…

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 life of the four March sisters living in a small New England community, Meg, the eldest,…

Introduction and Notes by Dr Ian Littlewood, University of Sussex. Pride and Prejudice, which opens with one of the most famous sentences in English Literature, is an ironic novel of manners. In it the garrulous and empty-headed M…

Introduction and Notes by Professor Stephen Arkin, San Francisco University. 'Young women who have no economic or political power must attend to the serious business of contriving material security'. Jane Austen's sardonic humour …

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Keith Carabine, University of Kent at Canterbury. Lucia is one of the great comic characters in English literature. Outrageously pretentious, hypocritical and snobbish, Queen Lucia, 'as by righ…

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Keith Carabine, University of Kent at Canterbury. These three wonderful comic novels drolly record the battle between Lucia and Elisabeth Mapp for social and cultural supremacy in the village o…

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue. The Professor is Charlotte Brontes first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and consciousness of a man, William Crimsworth. Like Jane Eyre he is parentless; like …

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Pamela Knights, Department of English Studies, Durham University. Lorna Doone, a Romance of Exmoor is an historical novel of high adventure set in the South West of England during the turbulent…

With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Merchant, Canterbury Christchurch University CollegeThe Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful and sometimes violent novel of expectation, love, oppression, sin, religion and betrayal. It por…

Agnes Grey is a trenchant expose of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-nineteenth century. This is a deeply personal novel written fro…

With an Introduction and Notes by Sally MinogueThe Shirley of the title is a woman of independent means; her friend Caroline is not. Both struggle with what a woman's role is and can be. Their male counterparts - Louis, the powerl…

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue, Department of English, Canterbury Christ Church University College. Based on Charlotte Bronte's personal experience as a teacher in Brussels, Villette is a moving tale of repress…

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 fa…

Selected and Introduced by M J Elliott. 'They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file; led by a stalking…

Selected and Introduced by M.J. Elliott. That is not dead that can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die Millenia ago, the Old Ones ruled our planet. Since that time, they have but slumbered. But when a massive s…

With an Introduction by John S. Whitley, University of Sussex. This collection of Poe's best stories contains all the terrifying and bewildering tales that characterise his work.As well as the Gothic horror of such famous stories …

With an Introduction by M.J. Elliott. 'My eyes, perversely shaken open, gazed for an instant upon a sight which no human creature could even imagine without panic, fear and physical exhaustion...' A wax museum in London boasts a n…

With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies. 'In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked fearful self, so like me my soul seemed to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude of bo…

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 l…

Sense and Sensibility is a delightful comedy of manners in which the sisters Elinor and Marianne represent these two qualities. Elinor's character is one of Augustan detachment, while Marianne, a fervent disciple of the Romantic A…

Considered by many to be Dickens' finest novel, Great Expectations traces the growth of the book's narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. From its famous dramatic opening on t…

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 humili…

Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction bet…