Topics in Literature

  • The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

    The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

    In Samuel Johnson’s classic philosophical tale, the prince and princess of Abissinia escape their confinement in the Happy Valley and conduct an ultimately unsuccessful search…

  • The London Jilt

    The London Jilt

    This entertaining novel’s full title, which claims that it will show “All the Artifices and Strategems which the Ladies of Pleasure make use of for…

  • The Woman of Colour

    The Woman of Colour

    The Woman of Colour is a unique literary account of a black heiress’ life immediately after the abolition of the British slave trade. Olivia Fairfield,…

  • Suffragette Sally

    Suffragette Sally

    Published in 1911, Suffragette Sally is one of the best-known popular novels promoting the cause of women’s suffrage in Britain at the beginning of the…

  • The Second Mrs Tanqueray

    The Second Mrs Tanqueray

    The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was the theatrical sensation of the London stage in 1893. It established Pinero as the leading English dramatist of serious social…

  • My Brilliant Career

    My Brilliant Career

    Written by a teenager living in the Australian bush in the 1890s and originally published in 1901, Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career is a candid…

  • New Grub Street

    New Grub Street

    New Grub Street is the only one of George Gissing’s two dozen novels never to have gone out of print, and has long been recognized…

  • The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus

    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…

  • Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura

    Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura

    Based on Leonora Sansay’s eyewitness accounts of the final days of French rule in Saint Domingue (Haiti), Secret History is a vivid account of race…

  • A Simple Story

    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

    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…

  • Jack Sheppard

    Jack Sheppard

    In London Labour and the London Poor (1861) Henry Mayhew wrote, “Of all books, perhaps none has ever had so baneful effect upon the young…

  • The Scottish Chiefs

    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…

  • Wuthering Heights - Ed. Newman

    Wuthering Heights – Ed. Newman

    Over a hundred and fifty years after its initial publication, Emily Brontë’s turbulent portrayal of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, two northern English households nearly…

  • Factory Lives

    Factory Lives

    Factory Lives contains four works of great importance in the field of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography: John Brown’s A Memoir of Robert Blincoe; William Dodd’s A…

  • Nightmare Abbey

    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 Mill on the Floss

    The Mill on the Floss

    This classic novel, first published in 1860, tells the story of Maggie Tulliver. Intelligent and headstrong but trapped by the conventions of family tradition and…

  • Doctor Faustus - Second Edition

    Doctor Faustus – Second Edition

    Doctor Faustus is a classic; its imaginative boldness and vertiginous ironies have fascinated readers and playgoers alike. But the fact that this play exists in…

  • Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Second Edition

    Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Second Edition

    This classic novel tells the story of how the poor rural couple John and Joan Durbeyfield become convinced that they are descended from the ancient…

  • Autobiography

    Autobiography

    Harriet Martineau lived an extraordinary literary life. She became a reviewer and journalist in the 1820s when her family’s fortune collapsed; published a best-selling series,…

  • The Memoir of 1603 and the Diary of 1616-1619

    The Memoir of 1603 and the Diary of 1616-1619

    Anne Clifford’s memoir for the year 1603 and her diary of 1616-1619 are invaluable records of the daily life and social and family relationships of…

  • Winona; or, The Foster-Sisters

    Winona; or, The Foster-Sisters

    The prize-winning entry in a national competition for distinctively Canadian fiction, Winona was serialized in a Montreal story paper in 1873. The novel focuses on…

  • Glances Backward

    Glances Backward

    Glances Backward brings together in one volume a broad selection of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American writings about gay male love, including love stories, Westerns,…

  • Sexing the Maple

    Sexing the Maple

    Sexing the Maple is a unique sourcebook designed to raise issues of nationalism and sexuality in Canada through a rich and diverse selection of fiction,…