Literary Criticism
The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises (1926) was Hemingway's first novel to be published, though there is his novella The Torrents of Spring which was publishe…
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
One of the greatest English tragic novels, TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES (1891) is the story of a “pure woman” who is victimized both by convent…
The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
Marcus Ordeyne is a middle aged bachelor schoolmaster who has inherited both money and a title and thus is able to lead a life of leisure. O…
The Beautiful and Damned
The Beautiful and Damned explores the lives of Anthony Patch and his wife, Gloria, as they navigate the opulent yet tumultuous world of 1920…
The Greater Inclination
This is Edith Wharton's earliest published collection of short stories (1899). Like much of her later work, they touch on themes of marriag…
The Claverings
"I consider the story as a whole to he good, though I am not aware that the public ever corroborated that verdict." - the author T…
The Doctor's Wife
This is one of the Victorian “Sensationist” Mary Elizabeth Braddon's many novels (best known among them: “Lady Audley’s Secret”). It is extr…
The Permanent Husband
THE PERMANENT HUSBAND, also published as The Eternal Husband, is a psychological novella by the acclaimed Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky.…
The American
One of James’s early novels, The American plunges right in to one of the writer’s most enduring subjects, that of the innocent, or at least …
The Warden
The Warden is the first novel in Anthony Trollope's series known as the "Chronicles of Barsetshire", making fun of the Church of E…
The House of the Dead
The House of the Dead is a novel published in 1861 by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberian p…
Candide
Candide is a relentless, brutal assault on government, society, religion, education, and, above all, optimism. Dr. Pangloss teaches his youn…
Madame Bovary
Written over a century and a half ago, Madame Bovary is still an extraordinarily fresh, exciting and shockingly frank novel, at once an acut…
Jude the Obscure
Eleven-year-old Jude Fawley, inspired by his teacher Mr. Phillotson, who leaves Marygreen for Christminster to take a university degree, dec…
Agnes Grey
Agnes Grey is a poignant exploration of the struggles faced by a young governess in 19th-century England. Anne Brontë draws from her ow…
The Touchstone
Stephen Glennard's career is falling apart and he desperately needs money so that he may marry his beautiful fiancee. He happens upon an adv…
The Descent of Man
This collection of ten stories, first published in 1904, shows Edith Wharton dissecting some of the customs, habits and vagaries of courtshi…
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Clearly frustrated at the refusal of his contemporaries to recognise the iniquity of society, Tressell's cast of hypocritical Christians, ex…
The Possessed
Although titled The Possessed in the initial English translation, Dostoyevsky scholars and later translations favour the titles The Devils o…
Life in the Iron Mills
This 1861 novella was the first published work by Rebecca Harding Davis: writer, social reformer, and pioneer of literary realism. It tell…