The doppelganger, the ghostly double infecting the soul, was a popular fictional subject for late nineteenth-century writers, and...

First published in 1516, during a period of astonishing political and technological change, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia depicts an...

The exhilaration that comes from reading Adam Bede owes its existence to the fact that on every page George Eliot seems absorbed...

A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery...

Anthony Trollope was well aware that the seemingly parochial power struggles that determine the action of Barchester Towers –...

Turgenev's first literary masterpiece was an eloquent evocation of rural Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. A hunter wanders...

Jane Austen seems to have been born with the comic precision and other-worldly insight she everywhere displays in Sense and...

Alone in the great social whirl of New York high society, with little but her wit and beauty to support her, Lily Bart pays the...

Described by F. R. Leavis as one of the two most brilliant novels in the language, The Portrait of a Lady marks the evolution of...

Hardy's account of a pure woman betrayed by love is his most powerful and moving novel. Set in the sometimes bleak but always...

David Copperfield – Dickens’s most celebrated novel, and the author’s own favourite – is the classic account of one boy growing...

One of the most popular twentieth-century novels, To the Lighthouse is the story of a woman and her family experiencing the...

A Passage to India, published in 1924 and set in British India in the years immediately preceding, is a powerful critique of both...

An immaculate success on its publication in 1726, Gulliver's Travels has since had an odd double life as both a classic...

Despite the grimness of his subject and the accuracy of his description, Zola tells an irresistible tale of life above and below...

Published in 1913, Lawrence’s closely autobiographical first major novel is set in the coal-mining villages where he spent his...

Regarded by many as Hardy's prose masterpiece, Far From the Madding Crowd is the tragi-comic story of a woman and three men....

Scott Fitzgerald was called the laureate of the Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby (1926) is a cynical celebration of the post-Great War...

Wilkie Collins’ novel took the fashionable world by storm on its appearance in 1860 when everything from dances to dresses was...

Turgenev’s most celebrated story examines the conflict of generations and attitudes in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, as distant...

Now a classic feminist text, Jane Eyre was the first of Charlotte Bronte’s novels to be published, in 1847. Like her sister...

Considered by many readers, including Shaw, Chesterton, Conrad and Trilling, as one of Dickens’s finest achievements, Bleak House...

This ribald, high-spirited novel, whose author was described by Diderot as 'the Rabelais of the English', provoked literary...

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, published 1871–2, is set in the imaginary county of Loamshire during the years of unrest...

Zbigniew... , Keats John

Painting and sculpture have inspired great poetry, but so also have photography, calligraphy, tapestry and folk art. Included...

A comprehensive collection of the best of the villanelle – the first anthology of its kind. The highly structured villanelle is a...

Stoddart... , Kingsley...

The Art of Angling offers a bountiful catch of poems from around the world and through the ages on every aspect of the popular...

A celebration of fathers and fatherhood, this anthology features the richly varied voices of sons and daughters, and of fathers...

Trees have starred in stories ever since Ovid described the nymph Daphne's metamorphosis into a laurel, and the landscape of...

Florence’s world-famous Renaissance is brought to life in this anthology through the eyes of its most illustrious chroniclers....