Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady tells the tragic story of a heroine whose quest for virtue is continually thwarted by her family, and is one of the longest novels in the English language. Clarissa Harlowe is a beautiful and virtuous young lady whose family has become wealthy only recently and now desires to become part of the aristocracy. Their original plan was to concentrate the wealth and lands of the Harlowes into the possession of Clarissa's...

There's a corpse in the bathtub, wearing nothing but a pair of pince-nez spectacles. Enter Lord Peter Wimsey, the original gentleman sleuth. Urged to investigate by his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, Lord Peter quickly ascertains that the sudden disappearance of a well-known financier is in some way connected to the body in the bathroom. But discovering exactly which way they're related leads the amateur detective on a merry chase.

First published in 1869, this deliberately written work follows the ambitions and whims of the young Frédéric Moreau as he travels from his provincial hometown to the enticing metropolis of Paris. Though he survived the Revolution of 1848, Moreau is still prone to all the mistakes and petty concerns of a young man of the middle class: he develops an infatuation for a married woman, Madame Arnoux, and falls in and out of love with her throughout...

"I felt a warm rasping at my throat, then came a consciousness of the awful truth, which chilled me to the heart and sent the blood surging up through my brain." In this intriguing literary fragment-published seventeen years after Bram Stoker's most famous novel-an English visitor to southern Germany suffers a terrifying ordeal on Walpurgis Nacht: the night when, according to local tradition, supernatural horrors are set free to walk the earth. But...

The Tomb tells of Jervas Dudley, a self-confessed day-dreamer. While still a child, he discovers the entrance to a mausoleum, belonging to the family Hyde, whose nearby family mansion had burnt down many years previously. The entrance to the mausoleum is padlocked and slightly ajar. Jervas attempts to break the padlock, but is unable. Dispirited, he takes to sleeping beside the tomb. Eventually, inspired by reading Plutarch's Lives, Dudley decides...

About this Wordsworth Classic: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a classic representation of the impoverished and politically powerless underclass of British society in Edwardian England, ruthlessly exploited by the institutionalized corruption of their employers and the civic and religious authorities. Epic in scale, the novel charts the ruinous effects of the laissez-faire mercantilist ethics on the men, women, and children of the working...

Oliver Goldsmith's 18th century novel "The Vicar of Wakefield" was so popular in Victorian times that it is mentioned in many classics of that era including George Eliot's "Middlemarch," Jane Austen's "Emma," Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", amongst others. It is the story of Dr. Charles Primrose, the titular Vicar, his wife Deborah and their six children who live an idyllic life in a country parish. The Vicar...

The celebrated Victorian author of Middlemarch explores the turbulent world of Florence during the Italian Renaissance in this sweeping historical novel. Florence, 1492. Lorenzo de Medici has just died, leaving governance of the Florentine Republic to his son Piero, an unskilled ruler. Meanwhile, Tito Melema, a shipwrecked stranger, finds love with a young woman named Romola, the devoted daughter of a blind scholar. Though her brother has a vision...

Cousin Bette (1846) is a novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Part of Balzac's La Comédie humaine sequence, the novel is recognized as being the author's last fully-realized work, and features several characters who appear elsewhere throughout his legendary series. It has inspired several film and television adaptations, as well as earned comparisons to Shakespeare's Othello and Tolstoy's War and Peace. The novel focuses on the life and exploits...

A man, a dog, and a horse. The call of the wild geese. A very smart doctor from the east who finds there is a lot to learn from these desert people. A woman loved by three men. A gunslinger who has a debt to settle. Max Brand brings them all together in another one of his over three hundred exciting western tales. Brand is not your typical western writer.