Victor Frankenstein creates a man, but abdicates his responsibility to his creation and molds him into a monster. Shelley's classic work reveals much about death, ideas of atheism, and the corrupting influence of society on human nature.

This is the story of a tormented foundling who falls in love with the daughter of his benefactor, and of the violence and misery that result from their thwarted longing for each other. Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë's only novel. Written between October 1845 and June 1846, Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 under the pseudonym "Ellis Bell". Emily Brontë died the following year, aged 30. After Emily's death, her sister Charlotte edited the...

First published serially between 1859 and 1860, “The Woman in White” is Wilkie Collins’s epistolary novel that tells the tale of Walter Hartright, who encounters a woman all dressed in white on a moonlit road in Hampstead. Hartright helps the woman to find her way back to London. The woman warns him against an unnamed baronet and after they part he discovers that she may have escaped from an insane asylum. Hartright travels to Cumberland where...

Gabriel Oak is a shepherd struggling to get ahead when Bathsheba Everdene moves next door. Although he loves her, she sees him as a friend and rejects him for two other suitors. After she leaves town, she and Gabriel are reunited years later, once everything has changed. In this classic novel, Thomas Hardy depicts the English countryside as idyllic but also hard and unforgiving, much like the Victorian mindsets of the day.

The Golden Bowl comes in the first years of the 20th-century: the publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, decided never to serialise it and published it in New York in December 1904 in two volumes. After just a few months, in February 1905, also Methuen published the novel in London in a one-volume edition. In 1909, a revised edition appeared as volumes 23 and 24 of the New York edition, and James this time also prepared the preface, in which he reflected...

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, discusses the author and the theater of his time, and provides quizzes and other study activities.

This book, published in 1890 and written by William Sharp, provides a biography and criticism of Robert Browning and his most famous works.

Find Out What Scott Really WroteGoing back to the original manuscripts, a team of scholars has uncovered what Scott originally wrote and intended his public to read before errors, misreadings and expurgations crept in during production.The Edinburgh Edition offers you:A clean, corrected textTextual historiesExplanatory notesVerbal changes from the first-edition textFull glossariesTitle DescriptionRob Roy is set in 1715, but it is less concerned with...

John Harmon returns from exile expecting to receive an inheritance, but knows that he must marry a stranger, Bella Wilfer, in order to collect. He fakes his own death and takes on a new identity in order to observe her first. Some of the memorable characters in this, the last completed Dickens novel, include Bella who, unllike other Dickens heroines, cannot be accused of unnatural virtue; the insolent barrister Eugene Wrayburn; the amiable Boffin;...

When Mr. Dashwood dies, he leaves his second wife and her three daughters at the mercy of his son and heir, John. John's wife convinces him to turn his step-mother and half-sisters out, and they move to a country cottage, rented to them by a distant relative. In their newly reduced circumstances Elinor and Marianne, the two eldest daughters, wrestle with ideas of romance and reality and their apparent opposition to each other. Elinor struggles in...