British Literature Editions

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  Mrs Warren’s Profession

  One of Bernard Shaw’s early plays of social protest, Mrs Warren’s Profession places the protagonist’s decision to become a prostitute in the context of the…

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  Adam Bede

  The seemingly peaceful country village of Hayslope is the setting for this ambitious first novel by one of the nineteenth century’s great novelists. With sympathy,…

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  Obi

  “Three-Fingered Jack,” the protagonist of this 1800 novel, is based on the escaped slave and Jamaican folk hero Jack Mansong, who was believed to have…

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  Moths

  First published in 1880, Moths addresses such Victorian taboos as adultery, domestic violence, and divorce in vivid and flamboyant prose. The beautiful young heroine, Vere…

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  Kim

  Kim tells the story of Kimball O’Hara, an orphaned Irish boy growing up in late nineteenth-century India, and his quest for identity as he strives…

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  Oliver Twist

  Charles Dickens’s famous second novel recounts the story of a boy born in the workhouse and raised in an infant farm as he tries to…

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  The Way We Live Now

  The Way We Live Now—regarded by many as Anthony Trollope’s greatest novel—encompasses in its broad scope much of the business, political, social, and literary life…

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  Memoirs of a Coxcomb

  Published in 1751, John Cleland’s second novel (after the notorious Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) is a witty and complex portrait of aristocratic British…

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  Romola

  The most exotic of George Eliot’s works, Romola recounts the story of the famous religious leader Savonarola in Florence at the time of Machiavelli and…

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  The Man of Feeling

  The Man of Feeling is unquestionably among the most important and influential works of eighteenth-century sentimental fiction. The novel follows Harley, the eponymous “man of…

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  Moll Flanders

  Born to a petty thief in London’s notorious Newgate prison and determined to make her way in a rapacious and materialistic society, Moll Flanders recounts…

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  Nature and Art

  Nature and Art commands a central place in the history of the English Jacobin novel. Published in 1796, the story explores the opposition between the…

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  Celestina

  Published here for the first time in a modern edition, Charlotte Smith’s third novel is both rivetingly plotted and unique for its time in its…

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  Illustrations of Political Economy

  Published in 1832, Illustrations of Political Economy established Harriet Martineau as both a successful and controversial author and a pioneer of nineteenth-century “social problem” writing.…

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  The Vagabond

  First published in 1799, George Walker’s The Vagabond was an immediate popular success. Offering a vitriolic critique of post-Bastille Jacobinism and sansculotte-style mob rule, its…

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  Middlemarch

  George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) is one of the classic novels of English literature and was admired by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English…

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  The Infernal Quixote

  The Infernal Quixote (1801) is an enjoyable comic romp in which Charles Lucas engages directly with the most pressing political issues of his day and…

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  The Communist Manifesto

  L.M. Findlay’s elegant new translation is a work of textual and historical scholarship. Few books have had as much of an impact on modern history…

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  Sociable Letters

  The writings of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, are remarkable for their vivid depiction of the mores and mentality of seventeenth-century England. This edition includes…

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  Harrington

  Harrington (1817) is the personal narrative of a recovering anti-Semite, a young man whose phobia of Jews is instilled in early childhood and who must…

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  The Woman Who Did

  The controversial subject matter of Grant Allen’s novel, The Woman Who Did, made it a major bestseller in 1895. It tells the story of Herminia…

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  Selections from The Girl’s Own Paper, 1880-1907

  The Girl’s Own Paper, founded in 1880, both shaped and reflected tensions between traditional domestic ideologies of the period and New Woman values in the…

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  Emma

  Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) tells the story of the coming of age of Emma Woodhouse, “handsome, clever, and rich,” who “had lived nearly twenty-one years…

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  The Beetle

  The Beetle (1897) tells the story of a fantastical creature, “born of neither god nor man,” with supernatural and hypnotic powers, who stalks British politician…