This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea-if you gazed intently, enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset. About...

Shirley, by Charlotte Brontë, is a poignant exploration of industrial and social upheaval in early 19th-century England, interwoven with personal and political struggles that resonate deeply with today's audience. Set during the industrial depression of the 1811-1812 Luddite uprisings, the novel delves into the lives of two contrasting heroines: the strong-willed, independent Shirley Keeldar and the gentle, introspective Caroline Helstone. Brontë's...

Thomas Hardy's first literary masterpiece, Far From the Madding Crowd is the story of free-spirited Bathsheba Everdene, whose bold independence attracts the attention of three suitors: the frugal shepherd Gabriel Oak, the lonely farmer William Boldwood, and the dashing young soldier Sergeant Francis Troy. Each man unsettles Bathsheba's life in some way, complicating her ideas of courtship and passion, and threatening to upset her quiet community....

"The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" is the second and final novel by the English author Anne Brontë. It was first published in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell. Probably the most shocking of the Brontës' novels, it had an instant and phenomenal success, but after Anne's death her sister Charlotte prevented its re-publication. The novel is framed as a series of letters from Gilbert Markham to his friend and brother-in-law about the events leading to...

Enter the provincial town of Middlemarch, circa 1830, where the individual destinies of tradespeople, middle classes, and country gentry shape and are shaped by the community.

"When the kind and imaginative seven-year-old Sara Crewe reaches Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies with her papa, she doesn't quite like it. 'I don't like it, papa,' she said. 'But then I dare say soldiers - even brave ones - don't really like going into battle.' The apple of her father's eye, Sara has all the privileges at the seminary and is treated with special care. Soon enough, she befriends her classmates and is nicknamed a...

The doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness.

Framley Parsonage is the fourth novel in Anthony Trollope's series known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire. It was first published in serial form in the Cornhill Magazine in 1860, then in book form in 1861. The hero of Framley Parsonage, Mark Robarts, is a young vicar, settled in the village of Framley in Barsetshire with his wife and children. The living has come into his hands through Lady Lufton, the mother of his childhood friend Ludovic, Lord...

Written when women and workers generally had few rights in England, Agnes Grey exposes the brutal inequities of the rigid class system in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Agnes comes from a respectable middle-class family, but their financial reverses have forced her to seek work as a governess. Pampered and protected at home, she is unprepared for the harsh reality of a governess's life. At the Bloomfields and later the Murrays, she suffers under...

The stunning collection of short fiction that established Nathaniel Hawthorne as one of the most powerful and provocative artists in nineteenth-century America   Dr. Heidegger invites four friends to witness an experiment. As the impoverished merchant Mr. Medbourne, the gout-ridden sinner Colonel Killigrew, the ruined politician Mr. Gascoigne, and the aged widow Wycherly watch, Heidegger places an old rose in a vase filled with water drawn from the...