The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton and Stephen Orgel (ed.)
‘They lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.’
Edith Wharton’s most ...
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Aurora Floyd
Mary Elizabeth Braddon and P. D. Edwards (ed.)
abstract
‘With Lady Audley’s Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon had established herself, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mrs Henry Wood, as one of the ruling ...
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The Awakening: And Other Stories
Kate Chopin and Pamela Knights (ed.)
‘She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.’ Kate Chopin was one of the most individual and adventurous of nineteenth-century american writers, whose fiction explored new ...
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The Book of Margery Kempe
Margery Kempe and Anthony Bale (ed.)
margery kempe (née Burnham, b. c.1373, d. after 1439) came from the town of
Bishop’s Lynn (now King’s Lynn, Norfolk). She was the daughter of a successful and ...
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The Custom of the Country
Edith Wharton and Stephen Orgel (ed.)
Edith Whartonߣs satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century appeared in 1913; it both appalled and fascinated its first reviewers, and established her ...
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The Enchanted April
Elizabeth von Arnim and Isobel Maddison (ed.)
Four very different women—the dishevelled and downtrodden Mrs Wilkins, the sad, sweet-faced Mrs Arbuthnot, the formidable widow Mrs Fisher, and the ravishing socialite Lady Caroline ...
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Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton and Elaine Showalter (ed.)
Set against the bleak winter landscape of New England, Ethan Frome tells the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver. In ...
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The Female Quixote: or The Adventures of Arabella
Charlotte Lennox, Margaret Dalziel (ed.), and Margaret Anne Doody
The Female Quixote (1752), a vivacious and ironical novel parodying the style of Cervantes, portrays the beautiful and aristocratic Arabella, whose passion for reading romances leads her ...
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The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton and Martha Banta (ed.)
Since its publication in 1905 The House of Mirth has commanded attention for the sharpness of Wharton's observations and the power of her style. Its heroine, Lily Bart, is beautiful, poor, ...
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Jacob’s Room
Virginia Woolf and Urmila Seshagiri (ed.)
Who is Jacob Flanders? Virginia Woolf’s third novel, published in 1922 alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, follows this elusive title character from a sunlit ...
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Kew Gardens and Other Short Fiction (2 ed.)
Virginia Woolf, Bryony Randall (ed.), and David Bradshaw (ed.)
Virginia Woolf’s short fiction has long been acknowledged as the place where she tried out some of her more experimental techniques before adopting and adapting them for use in her ...
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Lady Audley's Secret
Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Lyn Pykett (ed.)
It only rests with yourself to become Lady Audley, and the mistress of Audley Court.’ When beautiful young Lucy Graham accepts the hand of Sir Michael Audley, her fortune and her future ...
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The Last Man
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Morton D. Paley (ed.)
The last man! I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.’ Mary Shelley, Journal (May 1824). ...
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The Life of Charlotte Brontë
Elizabeth Gaskell and Angus Easson (ed.)
It is in every way worthy of what one great woman should have written of another.' Patrick Brontë Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) is a pioneering biography of one ...
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The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction
Virginia Woolf and David Bradshaw (ed.)
‘I shall never forget the day I wrote “The Mark on the Wall” - all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking for months. “The Unwritten Novel” was the great discovery, ...
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Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf and David Bradshaw (ed.)
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of ...
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My Ántonia
Willa Cather and Janet Sharistanian (ed.)
My Antonia (1918) depicts the pioneering period of European settlement on the tall-grass prairie of the American midwest, with its beautiful yet terrifying landscape, rich ...
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Night and Day
Virginia Woolf and Suzanne Raitt (ed.)
Katherine Hilbery, torn between past and present, is a figure reflecting Woolf’s own struggle with history. Both have illustrious literary ancestors: in Katherine’s case, her poet ...
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O Pioneers!
Willa Cather and Marilee Lindemann (ed.)
Willa Cather’s second novel, O Pioneers! (1913) tells the story of Alexandra Bergson and her determination to save her immigrant family’s Nebraska farm. Clear-headed and fiercely ...
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Orlando (2 ed.)
Virginia Woolf and Michael H. Whitworth (ed.)
Orlando tells the tale of an extraordinary individual who lives through centuries of English history, first as a man, then as a woman; of his/her encounters with queens, kings, ...
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