With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the novel with which...

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is one of the greatest tragic dramas the world has known. Macbeth himself, a brave warrior, is fatally...

Hamlet is not only one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, but also the most fascinatingly problematical tragedy in world...

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart…”

Crime and Punishment is one of the...

Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a break with the traditional novel form and reflects a genuine...

Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy’s Wessex novels. It tells the story of the young farmer Gabriel...

'There he lay looking as if youth had been half-renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey, the...

Dickens had already achieved renown with The Pickwick Papers. With Oliver Twist his reputation was enhanced and strengthened. The...

By the time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had completed the twelve stories for The Strand magazine that are gathered together in The...

Living overseas but writing, always, about his native city, Joyce made Dublin unforgettable. The stories in Dubliners show us...

'Doctor Watson, Mr Sherlock Holmes' - The most famous introduction in the history of crime fiction takes place in Sir Arthur...

Having firmly established the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in the novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the...

When Father goes away with two strangers one evening, the lives of Roberta, Peter and Phyllis are shattered. They and their...

Sense and Sensibility is a delightful comedy of manners in which the sisters Elinor and Marianne represent these two qualities....

Jane Austen teased readers with the idea of a 'heroine whom no one but myself will much like', but Emma is irresistible....

What does persuasion mean - a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of...

Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy,...

Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has...

Considered by many to be Dickens' finest novel, Great Expectations traces the growth of the book's narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip),...

Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a...

Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky...

Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel, The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the "roaring...

Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan who has hung on determinedly to an optimistic spirit and a wildly creative imagination...

Treasure Island is the seminal pirates and buried treasure novel, which is so brilliantly concocted that it appeals to readers...

The Little Prince is a modern fable, and for readers far and wide both the title and the work have exerted a pull far in excess...

The Jungle Book introduces Mowgli, the human foundling adopted by a family of wolves. It tells of the enmity between him and the...

Far from fading with time, Kenneth Grahame's classic tale of fantasy has attracted a growing audience in each generation. Rat,...

A Christmas Carol is the most famous, heart-warming and chilling festive story of them all. In these pages we meet Ebenezer...

With an Introduction and Notes by Michael Irwin, Professor of English Literature, University of Kent at Canterbury.
Tweedledum...

Mary Lennox was horrid. Selfish and spoilt, she was sent to stay with her hunchback uncle in Yorkshire. She hated it.
But when...