British Literature

  • The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant

    The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant

    After the death of Margaret Oliphant—the prolific nineteenth-century novelist, biographer, essayist, reviewer, and prominent voice on the “woman question”—two well-intending relatives took the autobiographical manuscripts…

  • Wuthering Heights - Ed. Heywood

    Wuthering Heights – Ed. Heywood

    Critics often comment on the importance of landscape in Wuthering Heights, and in this edition, Christopher Heywood locates the text more precisely than previous editions…

  • A Room of One's Own

    A Room of One’s Own

    “But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I…

  • Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose

    Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose

    At her death in 1825, Anna Letitia Barbauld was considered one of the great writers of her time. Distinguished as a poet and essayist, she…

  • The Clever Woman of the Family

    The Clever Woman of the Family

    Charlotte Mary Yonge was one of the most prolific writers of the nineteenth century. Though perhaps best known for her popular children’s books, she also…

  • Desmond

    Desmond

    Desmond is a political novel about the French Revolution. It is Charlotte Smith’s only epistolary work, and it is her most politically radical piece. Written…

  • The Ring and the Book

    The Ring and the Book

    In June, 1860, Browning purchased an “old yellow book” from a bookstall in Florence. The book contained legal briefs, pamphlets, and letters relating to a…

  • Letters Written in France

    Letters Written in France

    Helen Maria Williams was a poet, novelist, and radical thinker deeply immersed in the political struggles of the 1790s. Her Letters Written in France is…

  • The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama

    The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama

    This is the first new full-scale anthology of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama in over sixty years. Concentrating on plays from the heyday of 1660-1737, it…

  • Vathek with The Episodes of Vathek

    Vathek with The Episodes of Vathek

    William Beckford’s Vathek is a touchstone of eighteenth-century Orientalism and of the Gothic novel. Beckford’s later work, The Episodes of Vathek, shares Vathek’s irreverent and…

  • The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

    The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

    Set in early eighteenth-century Scotland, James Hogg’s masterpiece is a brilliant psychological study of religious fanaticism and the power of evil. Led on by his…

  • Joseph Andrews

    Joseph Andrews

    Joseph Andrews, first published in 1742, is in part a parody of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. But whereas Richardson’s novel is marked by the virtues of…

  • Mansfield Park

    Mansfield Park

    Mansfield Park is Jane Austen’s darkest, and most complex novel. In contrast to the confident and vivacious heroines of Emma and Pride and Prejudice, its…

  • Sense and Sensibility

    Sense and Sensibility

    Jane Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, is a witty satire of the sentimental novel, a popular genre in Britain throughout the 1790s and…

  • The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Prose

    The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Prose

    The publication of The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose is a literary event; this comprehensive volume is the first anthology of the period…

  • The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse

    The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse

    The publication of The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose is a literary event; this comprehensive volume is the first anthology of the period…

  • David Copperfield

    David Copperfield

    In a preface to this novel, Dickens described David Copperfield as his “favorite child,” and the story has remained among the favorites of Dickens’ readers,…

  • The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

    The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

    The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was a key work of nineteenth-century slave narrative autobiography. Written and published by Equiano, a former…

  • Plays on the Passions

    Plays on the Passions

    Baillie’s eminently readable dramas stand at the crossroads of the Scottish Enlightenment and early Romanticism, and compellingly engage with questions of women’s rights. Her exploration…

  • Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

    Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

    William Godwin’s memoir of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, marks a transition in Godwin’s philosophical development from extreme rationalism to the recognition of the moral importance…

  • The Time Machine

    The Time Machine

    Wells was interested in the implications of evolutionary theory on the future of human beings at the biological, sociological, and cultural levels, and The Time…

  • Fleetwood

    Fleetwood

    Fleetwood is a pivotal novel of early English Romanticism and a powerful critique of the Romantic emotionalism being spread across Europe in Rousseau’s name. Godwin’s…

  • The Tragedy of Mariam

    The Tragedy of Mariam

    First published in 1613, The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry is probably the first play in English known to have been authored…

  • The Warden

    The Warden

    The first of Trollope’s Barsetshire novels, The Warden concerns the moral dilemma of the Reverend Septimus Harding, who finds himself at the centre of a…