Romantic Period Editions

Showing 25–48 of 80 results

  • 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…

  • 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 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…