British Literature

Showing 385–408 of 419 results

  • Persuasion

    For her last novel’s plot, Austen returns to the tensions of inheritance; but the once satisfactory solution—security on a landed estate—no longer applies. Here, Anne,…

  • The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless

    Prolific even by eighteenth-century standards, Eliza Haywood was the author of more than eighty titles, including short fiction, novels, periodicals, plays, poetry, and a political…

  • Great Expectations

    Originally published in serial form from December 1860 to August 1861, Great Expectations is the ‘autobiography’ of Pip, as he transformed from apprentice village blacksmith…

  • Aurora Floyd

    Aurora Floyd is one of the leading novels in the genre known as ‘sensation fiction’—a tradition in which the key texts include Wilkie Collins’s The…

  • The Odd Women

    George Gissing’s The Odd Women dramatizes key issues relating to class and gender in late-Victorian culture: the changing relationship between the sexes, the social impact…

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray

    In Oscar Wilde’s famous novel, Dorian Gray is tempted by Henry Wotton to sell his soul in order to hold on to beauty and youth.…

  • Dracula

    To borrow a phrase used by one of the characters in the novel, Dracula is “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance.” In her introduction to…

  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon – Selected Writings

    The work of ‘L.E.L.’ began to be published when she was only seventeen, and in her early twenties Landon had already achieved considerable renown. As…

  • The Vindications: The Rights of Men and The Rights of Woman

    The works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) ranged from the early Thoughts on the Education of Daughters to The Female Reader, a selection of texts for…

  • Zofloya

    The protagonist of Charlotte Dacre’s best known novel, Zofloya, or the Moor (1806) is unique in women’s Gothic and Romantic literature, and has more in…

  • Nostromo

    Nostromo, first published in 1904, is arguably Conrad’s greatest and most complex novel. A compelling adventure story, it is also a novel of profound psychological…

  • The Mayor of Casterbridge

    This 1886 novel may be Hardy’s most intense and gripping narrative. We first see the central character, Michael Henchard, as a drunken and unemployed hay-trusser…

  • Lodore

    Beset by jealousy over an admirer of his wife’s, Lord Lodore has come with his daughter Ethel to the American wilderness; his wife Cornelia, meanwhile,…

  • Heart and Science

    Wilkie Collins’s later novels are often as concerned with social issues as they are with simple storytelling—but as more and more critics are suggesting, the…

  • The Last Man

    Mary Shelley’s third published novel, The Last Man, is a disillusioned vision of the end of civilization, set in the twenty-first century. The book offers…

  • Something New

    To be a heroine is to be beautiful—such has been the unstated assumption from the time of chivalric romance to that of Harlequin romance. But…

  • Hard Times

    Despite the title, Dickens’s portrayal of early industrial society here is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or…

  • The Cognitive Revolution in Western Culture

    Why are the plots of Shakespeare and his contemporaries so different from those of his predecessors? This book argues that the answer is in part…

  • The Clandestine Marriage

    David Garrick, the leading actor of his time, was also one of its most accomplished dramatists, and The Clandestine Marriage is perhaps his finest play.…

  • Millenium Hall

    In 1750 at the age of twenty-seven Sarah Scott published her first novel, a conventional romance. A year later she left her husband after only…

  • Nineteenth-Century Stories by Women

    “The female novelist of the nineteenth century may have frequently encountered opposition and interference from the male literary establishment, but the female short story writer,…

  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – Facing Page Translation

    The fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the greatest classics of English literature, but one of the least accessible to…

  • A Bold Stroke for a Wife

    Though critics and literary historians have always had to admit that Susanna Centlivre’s comedies were extremely popular, they have tended to devote themselves to a…

  • The Evil Genius

    Wilkie Collins is best known for his great mystery The Moonstone and The Woman in White—and for a life as sensational as are those novels.…