Romantic Period Editions
Showing 25–48 of 79 results
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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…
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The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan
In 1810, the orientalist scholar Charles Stewart translated and published an extraordinary travel narrative written by a Persian-speaking Indian poet and scholar named Mirza Abu…
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Lyrical Ballads
Long central to the canon of British Romantic literature, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads is a fascinating case study in the history…
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The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus
In 1816, John William Polidori travelled to Geneva as Lord Byron’s personal physician. There they met Mary Godwin (later Shelley) and her lover Percy Shelley…
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A Simple Story
After its publication in early 1791, A Simple Story was widely read in England and abroad, going into a second edition in March of the…
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Coelebs in Search of a Wife
In this, Hannah More’s only novel and an early nineteenth-century best-seller, More gives voice to a wealthy twenty-three-year-old bachelor, who styles himself “Coelebs” (unmarried), but…
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The Scottish Chiefs
Rooted in political controversy, gender warfare, violence, and revolution, Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs is the epic story of William Wallace’s struggle for Scottish independence…
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Nightmare Abbey
This 1818 novel is set in a former abbey whose owner, Christopher Glowry, is host to visitors who enjoy his hospitality and engage in endless…
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The Keepsake for 1829
Literary annuals played a major role in the popular culture of nineteenth-century Britain and America, and The Keepsake was the most distinguished, successful, and enduring…
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St. Leon
Set in Europe during the Protestant Reformation and first published in 1799, St. Leon tells the story of an impoverished aristocrat who obtains the philosopher’s…
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The Idea of Being Free
Mary Hays (1759-1843) is often best remembered for her early revolutionary novels The Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice. In this collection,…
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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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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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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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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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Bug-Jargal
Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826) is one of the most important works of nineteenth-century colonial fiction, and quite possibly the most sustained novelistic treatment of the…
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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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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 Monk
The Monk is the most sensational of Gothic novels. The main plot concerns Ambrosio, an abbot of irreproachable holiness, who is seduced by a woman…
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Emmeline
The plot of Charlotte Smith’s autobiographical first novel Emmeline (1788) includes the usual thrills of the eighteenth-century courtship novel: abduction, duels, and a “fairy tale…
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Walsingham
Walsingham is both a lively story and a commentary by Mary Robinson on her society’s constraints upon women. The novel follows the lives of two…
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A Letter to the Women of England and The Natural Daughter
Mary Robinson’s A Letter to the Women of England (1799) is a radical response to the rampant anti-feminist sentiment of the late 1790s. In this…
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The Father and Daughter with Dangers of Coquetry
The Father and Daughter was one of the most widely read novels of the early nineteenth century, captivating readers with its pathos and melodrama. It…