Jane Weatherby wants a more exciting match for her son than Mary Pomfret and decides to take action to break off their engagement. Central to her schemes is Mary's father, John, who used to be Jane's lover and just might be again. Narrated mainly...
One of Dickens’ most enduringly popular stories is Oliver Twist, an early work published 1837-8. Like many of his later novels, its central theme is the hardship faced by the dispossessed and those of the outside of ‘polite’ society. Oliver...
The Donne family's move to the country is inspired by a wish to be close to their cousins, who are to be their nearest neighbours. It proves too close for comfort, however. For a secret switching of wills causes the most genteel pursuit of...
Joyce's Irish experiences are essential to his writings, and provide all of the settings for his fiction and much of their subject matter. The early volume of short stories, Dubliners , is a penetrating analysis of the stagnation and paralysis of...
The Egoist by George Meredith recounts the story of self-absorbed Sir Willoughby Patterne and his attempts at marriage; jilted by his first bride-to-be, he vacillates between the sentimental Laetitia Dale and the strong-willed Clara Middleton....
Ecstasy is the story of young widow roused out of the torpor of her solitude by a dalliance with a courtly womanizer. It is written in a dreamily impressionistic style whose primary concern is to capture its heroine's eternally shifting moods at...
Never before in English, Regina Ullmann's work is distinctive and otherworldly, resonant of nineteenth-century village tales and of authors such as Adalbert Stifter and her contemporary Robert Walser. In the stories of The Country Road, largely set...