A young woman, Cytherea Graye, is forced by poverty to accept a post as lady's maid to the eccentric Miss Aldclyffe, the woman whom her father had loved but had been unable to marry. Cytherea loves a young architect, Edward Springrove, but Miss Adclyffe's machinations, the discovery that Edward is already engaged to a woman whom he does not love, and the urgent need to support a sick brother drive Cytherea to accept the hand of Aeneas Manston, Miss...

Moving from the industrial riots of discontented millworkers through to the unsought passions of a middle-class woman, and from religious crises of conscience to the ethics of naval mutiny, it poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Through the story of Margaret Hale, the middle-class southerner who moves to the northern industrial town of Milton, Gaskell skilfully explores issues of class and gender in the...

Middlemarch is a recognized masterpiece that explores the complex social world of 19th century England. It is concerned with the lives of several ordinary people, albeit ones with high social standing. The novel explores the very fabric of Victorian society in the 1800s, showing how various human passions--heroism, egotism, love, and lust--interrelate within this society.

No Name by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century novel revolving upon the issue of illegitimacy. It combines social commentary - the absurdity of the law as it applied to children of unmarried parents - with a densely-plotted revenge thriller.

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...

Set in the early nineteenth-century English countryside, an English squire yields to the temptations of an innocent country girl and crime, remorse, and suffering are the consequences.

"Two sisters reconnect and pursue their dreams on the beautiful island of Nantucket, overcoming life's challenges and finding new love, in this heartwarming and hopeful novel by New York Times bestselling author Nancy Thayer. Eddie Grant is happy with her life and her work as a personal assistant to Dinah Lavender, one of the most famous and renowned romance authors in the business. But being a spectator to notoriety and glamour isn't as fulfilling...

When Catherine Morland, a country clergyman's daughter, is invited to spend a season in Bath with the fashionable high society, little does she imagine the delights and perils that await her. Captivated and disconcerted by what she finds, and introduced to the joys of 'Gothic novels' by her new friend, Isabella, Catherine longs for mystery and romance. When she is invited to stay with the beguiling Henry Tilney and his family at Northanger Abbey,...

With new illustrations and a brilliant original introduction by New Yorker writer and author of My Life in Middlemarch Rebecca Mead, the Restless Classics edition of Middlemarch presents George Eliot's masterpiece of Victorian fiction in an appealing new light. Long regarded as one of the greatest of the great English-language novels, Middlemarch by George Eliot has endured as the archetypal Victorian novel and an eternally resonant exploration of...

"Published one year after its author's death in 1818, "Persuasion is Jane Austen's last completed novel. On its most basic level, the book is a love story. On another level, it is a deft exploration of human foibles and social flux. Twenty-seven-year-old Anne Elliot is Austen's most adult heroine. Eight years before the story proper begins, she is happily betrothed to a navel officer, Frederick Wentworth, but she precipitously breaks off the engagement...