In a remote sea-swept parish in Cornwall, high-spirited young Elfride is the sheltered daughter of the Rector. She has little experience of the world until two men tear her life apart: the boyish architect, Stephen Smith, and the older literary man, Henry Knight. The former friends become rivals and Elfride faces an agonizing choice.

When Catherine Morland, a country clergyman's daughter, is invited to spend a season in Bath with the fashionable high society, little does she imagine the delights and perils that await her. Captivated and disconcerted by what she finds, and introduced to the joys of 'Gothic novels' by her new friend, Isabella, Catherine longs for mystery and romance. When she is invited to stay with the beguiling Henry Tilney and his family at Northanger Abbey,...

First published serially between 1859 and 1860, “The Woman in White” is Wilkie Collins’s epistolary novel that tells the tale of Walter Hartright, who encounters a woman all dressed in white on a moonlit road in Hampstead. Hartright helps the woman to find her way back to London. The woman warns him against an unnamed baronet and after they part he discovers that she may have escaped from an insane asylum. Hartright travels to Cumberland where...

A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in this masterpiece of tragic fiction. Hardy's 1891 novel defied convention to focus on the rural lower class for a frank treatment of sexuality and religion. Then and now, his sympathetic portrait of a victim of Victorian hypocrisy offers compelling reading.

One of the most versatile and influential figures in twentieth-century literature, D.H. Lawrence was a master craftsman and profound thinker whose celebration of sexuality in an over-intellectualized world opened the door to that topic for countless writers after him. Perhaps his finest novel, Women in Love (1920) continues the story of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, who first appeared in Lawrence's novel The Rainbow (1915). The story contrasts...

Jane Eyre (originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography) is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published on 16 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London, England, under the pen name "Currer Bell." The first American edition was released the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York. Primarily of the bildungsroman genre, Jane Eyre follows the emotions and experiences of its title character, including her growth to adulthood,...

"Rose Hamilton is in desperate need of a life change when she reads the want ad in the newspaper for a companion needed to escort a young orphaned child to Australia. There are so many reasons she should ignore the advertisement-the war, those treacherous winter seas, her family, her fiance... but she can't help herself. Within weeks she is boarding an enormous convoy, already too attached to five-year-old Walter. Unfortunately, the cattle station...