British Literature Editions

  • Waverley

    Waverley

    Sir Walter Scott’s first novel, Waverley enjoyed tremendous popularity upon its first publication. The novel is set during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, which sought…

  • The Wood Beyond the World

    The Wood Beyond the World

    A groundbreaking fantasy novel, The Wood Beyond the World tells the story of a young man, Golden Walter, who finds himself in a strange and…

  • Cleanness

    Cleanness

    This edition provides a new facing-page translation of an important Middle English alliterative poem, generally attributed to the author of Sir Gawain and the Green…

  • Robinson Crusoe

    Robinson Crusoe

    Robinson Crusoe is one of the most famous literary characters in history, and his story has spawned hundreds of retellings. Inspired by the life of…

  • The Egoist

    The Egoist

    In The Egoist, his comic masterpiece, George Meredith takes the traditional marriage plot of English domestic fiction and turns it on its head. The novel…

  • Cometh Up As A Flower

    Cometh Up As A Flower

    An important sensation novel, Cometh Up as a Flower made Rhoda Broughton’s reputation and fortune while also attracting harsh criticism. Nell LeStrange, the heroine, is…

  • Adeline Mowbray

    Adeline Mowbray

    When Adeline Mowbray puts her mother Editha’s radical theories into practice by eloping with, but not marrying, a notorious writer, the mother and daughter are…

  • Flatland

    Flatland

    Flatland (1884) is an influential mathematical fantasy that simultaneously provides an introduction to non-Euclidean geometry and a satire on the Victorian class structure, issues of…

  • Tales of Wonder

    Tales of Wonder

    In the late eighteenth century, Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis, a notorious author of lurid Gothic novels and plays, began to gather this collection of horror…

  • The History of Sandford and Merton

    The History of Sandford and Merton

    Among the earliest novels written about children, for children, The History of Sandford and Merton was enormously popular for a century and a half after…

  • The Importance of Being Earnest

    The Importance of Being Earnest

    The Importance of Being Earnest marks a central moment in late-Victorian literature, not only for its wit but also for its role in the shift…

  • Under Western Eyes

    Under Western Eyes

    Joseph Conrad’s last overtly political novel, Under Western Eyes is considered to be one of his greatest works. Set in pre-Revolutionary Russia, the novel tells…

  • The Secret Agent

    The Secret Agent

    The Secret Agent is set in the seedy world of Adolf Verloc, a storekeeper and double agent in late-Victorian London who pretends to sympathize with…

  • The Man in the Moone

    The Man in the Moone

    Arguably the first work of science fiction in English, Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone was published in 1638, pseudonymously and posthumously. The novel,…

  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems

    Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems

    One of the leading poets of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a profound influence on her contemporaries and on writers that followed her.…

  • The Basset Table

    The Basset Table

    The Basset Table follows the fortunes of Lady Reveller, who runs a table where her friends play the card game basset, and her struggle to…

  • The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

    The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

    Anne Brontë’s second and last novel was widely and contentiously reviewed upon its 1848 publication, in part because its subject matter domestic violence, alcoholism, women’s…

  • Autobiographical Sketches

    Autobiographical Sketches

    Annie Wood Besant (1847-1933) was a problematic and notorious figure in Victorian England, questioning and then breaking from the Anglican Church to become an atheist,…

  • Michael Field: The Poet

    Michael Field: The Poet

    “Michael Field” was the literary pseudonym of two women, Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913). The women were poets, playwrights, diarist, and…

  • The Island of Doctor Moreau

    The Island of Doctor Moreau

    A classic of science fiction and a dark meditation on Darwinian thought in the late Victorian period, The Island of Doctor Moreau explores the possibility…

  • Roxana

    Roxana

    Almost three hundred years after its first publication, Roxana continues to challenge readers, who, though compelled by Roxana’s story, are often baffled by her complex…

  • Three Essays on Religion

    Three Essays on Religion

    John Stuart Mill was one of the most important political and social thinkers of the nineteenth century, and his writings on human rights, feminism, the…

  • Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

    Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

    Confessions of an English Opium-Eater remains its author’s most famous and frequently-read work and one of the period’s central statements about both the power and…

  • The Diary of a Nobody

    The Diary of a Nobody

    The Diary of a Nobody, the spoof diary of Charles Pooter, a London clerk, first appeared as a book in 1892 and has never been…