Topics in Literature

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  King Solomon’s Mines

  When first published, King Solomon’s Mines (1885) was an enormous popular success. The narrative follows the explorations of Allan Quatermain, a fortune hunter who travels…

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  Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

  Set in the fictional landscape of Mariposa on the shores of Lake Wissanotti in Missinaba County, Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is an…

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  The Coming Race – Encore Edition

  “As I drew near and nearer to the light, the chasm became wider, and at last I saw, to my unspeakable amaze, a broad level…

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  Emma Lazarus

  The greatest American Jewish author of the nineteenth century, Emma Lazarus was a celebrated poet and humanitarian activist. This edition is a broad collection of…

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  Infelicia and Other Writings

  Adah Isaacs Menken was the most highly paid and most scandalous stage performer of the 1860s. She is also one of the most fascinating and…

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  Northanger Abbey – Second Edition

  First accepted by a publisher in 1803, Northanger Abbey was eventually published posthumously in 1818. In it Austen weaves a romance full of suspense and…

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  The Rebel of the Family

  The Rebel of the Family (1880) is the first New Woman novel by Eliza Lynn Linton. Perdita Winstanley, the novel’s protagonist, struggles to balance the…

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  A Serious Proposal to the Ladies

  Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is one of the most important and neglected works advocating the establishment of women’s academies. Its reception…

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  Marcella

  Marcella, young and with a new-womanly independence, has a yearning to help the poor. When a gamekeeper is murdered near where she lives, Marcella finds…

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  Bell in Campo and The Sociable Companions

  Written during the English Civil War and Interregnum when the public theatres were closed and Margaret Cavendish was living away from England in exile, Bell…

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  Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne

  In 1810, while still at Eton, Percy Bysshe Shelley published Zastrozzi, the first of his two early Gothic prose romances. He published the second, St.…

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  Hermsprong

  Robert Bage’s Hermsprong satirizes English society of the 1790s targeting, in particular, corrupt clergymen, grasping lawyers and wicked aristocrats. The protagonist, a European raised among…

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  The Missionary

  Set in seventeenth-century India, The Missionary focuses on the relationship between Hilarion, a Portuguese missionary to India, and Luxima, an Indian prophetess. Both are aristocratic,…

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  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…

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  My Mother’s Voice

  Named Honor Book of the Year by the Children’s Literature Association Winner: 2003 Canadian Jewish Book Award for scholarship on a Jewish subject Finalist: 2003…

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  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…

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  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…

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  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…

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  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…

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  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…

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  The Pool in the Desert

  In The Pool in the Desert, first published in 1903, Sara Jeannette Duncan explores the impact of isolation on the small British communities of Victorian…

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  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…

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  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…

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  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…