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This book is often thought to be the story of Jane Austen's own lost love. In it, she seems mellowed and more philosophical, touched perhaps by the sentiment of a story in which she saw herself as the heroine but in whose happy outcome she has a premonition that she would never play a part.

Almost three years after losing my husband, Jim, to ALS, I’ve started to emerge from the fog of widowhood, thanks in large part to my sexy roommate—and former high school crush—Tom Hammett. When he offered me a suite in his spacious home, he got me out of my parents’ basement where I’d lived with Jim during his illness and since his death. But now Tom is experiencing a health crisis, and I’m not sure I have it in me to go down that road again, even if I suspect I might be falling in love with him.

Thomas Hardy, never one to be conventional, took a very unconventional moral stance in this novel, which shocked readers of the time. In doing so, he created one of the great romantic novels of all time, the story of a striking and tragic heroine who came to life for the reader as she did for the author.

Rule by head or rule by heart? Elinor Dashwood is a great believer in "sense," while her exuberant younger sister Marianne feels keenly that only "sensibility" (what today we'd call passion) serves to guide the heart. Through vicissitudes and, in the case of Marianne, outright betrayal by her lover, these two women learn the value in the other's outlook, and thereby prepare themselves for later domestic bliss that is the hallmark resolution of Jane Austen's novels.

Kept in the Dark is a probing psychological portrait of the near destruction of a marriage - a novel that combines keen insights with vigorous emotional strength. Jealousy, guilt, excessive pride, and compulsion all sweep across its surface.

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 near Dorchester in that part of England he called Wessex. With stories sometimes from his own imagination and sometimes from local tradition, Hardy's work, like Dickens and Trollope, creates a strong sense of mood and location. Hardy hoped to be remembered for his poetry, but ours is not a poetic age. Thus his claim to a new generation of readers rests on his prose. There are great similarities between his era, a time of challenge, and our own.

This fine novel sets in opposition two of Thomas Hardy’s most unforgettable creations: his heroine, the sensuous, free-spirited Eustacia Vye, and the solemn, majestic stretch of upland in Dorsetshire he called Egdon Heath. The famous opening reveals the haunting power of that dark, forbidding...

Full of irony, this comedy of manners satirizes the self-deception of vanity. Emma presents a picture of mixed family and social life as did Pride and Prejudice, though mellowed by a riper humor. Emma equals Pride and Prejudice in its rich humor and vivid portraiture of character. It is a never ending delight in human absurdities, which the fascinated listener shares from chapter to chapter.

A panoramic satire of English society during the Napoleonic Wars, Vanity Fair is William Makepeace Thackeray’s masterpiece. At its center is one of the most unforgettable characters in nineteenth-century literature: the enthralling Becky Sharp, a charmingly ruthless social climber who is...

Eve's Ransom, written in 1895, is the story of a bizarre triangle of love. An educated but unsuccessful man, Hilliard, is trapped in grimy Birmingham until he receives a totally unexpected windfall. He goes in search of a woman whose picture he had seen in his landlady's photo album. Typical of most of Gissings books the setting is autobiographically faithful and the theme is freedom. The writing is crisp, the narrative swift in this, as H. G. Wells said, "the best and least appreciated of his novels".

The Well of the World's End is a Scottish fairy tale, from the Lowlands, collected by Joseph Jacobs in English Fairy Tales. In the story, a girl's mother died, and her father remarried. Her stepmother abused her, made her do all the housework, and finally decided to be rid of her. How the girl, with the help of a magic frog, outwitted the stepmother is the gist of the story.

First appearing in 1882, this collection by Mrs. J.H. Riddell established her as a leading Victorian author of supernatural fiction. She achieved her effect by using commonplace settings into which the horrors crept.

The real Jonathan Wild, born about 1682 and executed at Tyburn in 1725, was one of the most notorious criminals of his age. His resemblance to the hero in Fielding's satire of the same name is general rather than particular. The real Jonathan (whose legitimate business was that of a buckle-maker) like Fielding, won his fame, not as a robber himself, but as an informer, and a receiver of stolen goods.

Thomas Hardy brings us an England that once existed but no more. It is rural, traditional, pastoral - a society of mannered conduct that flows like a deep river where powerful currents eddy and swirl. In this powerful novel of love and disillusion, Hardy's heroine is torn between the three men in her life. Passionate but capricious, her romantic involvements have fascinated generations of readers.

Dick Whittington is a character in a British folklore, very loosely based on Richard Whittington, a medieval merchant as well as Lord Mayor of London and a Member of Parliament. In this traditional story, Dick, a boy from a poor family, sets out for London to make his fortune, accompanied by his cat. They have a number of remarkable adventures along the way.

"Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't understand! Look at this letter! The man who wrote it will marry her, or murder her, or do for her somehow. He's a bounder, but he's not an English bounder. He's mysterious and terrible. He's got a country behind him that's...