BookOdyssey

With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Roger Cardinal. University of Kent at Canterbury. Translationsare by Paul Desages (Around the World in Eighty Days) and Arthur Chambers (Five Weeks in a Balloon). JULES VERNE (1828-1905) POSSESSED that rare storyteller\'s gift of being able to present the far-fetched and the downright unbelievable in such a way as effortlessly to inspire his reader\'s allegiance and trust. This volume contains two of his best-loved yarns, chosen from among the sixty-four titles of Les Voyages Extraordinaires, Verne\'s pioneering contribution to the canon of modern science fiction. Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) relates the hair-raising journey made as a wager by the Victorian gentleman Phileas Fogg, who succeeds - but only just! - in circling the globe within eighty days. The dour Fogg\'s obsession with his timetable is complemented by the dynamism and versatility of his French manservant, Passepartout, whose talent for getting into scrapes brings colour and suspense to the race against time. Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) was Verne\'s first novel. It documents an apocryphal jaunt across the continent of Africa in a hydrogen balloon designed by the omniscient, imperturbable and ever capable Dr Fergusson, the prototype of the Vernian adventurer. Σελίδες: 384, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by Roger Clark, University of Kent at Canterbury. Translation by Charles E. Wilbour (1862). One of the great classics of western literature, Les Misérables is a magisterial work which is rich in both character portrayal and meticulous historical description. Characters such as the absurdly criminalised Valjean, the street urchin Gavroche, the rascal Thenardier, the implacable detective Javert, and the pitiful figure of the prostitute Fantine and her daughter Cosette, have entered the pantheon of literary dramatis personae. The reader is also treated to the unforgettable descriptions of the Battle of Waterloo and Valjean’s flight through the Paris sewers. Volume 1 of 2 Σελίδες: 528, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by Sally Minogue The Shirley of the title is a woman of independent means; her friend Caroline is not. Both struggle with what a woman\'s role is and can be. Their male counterparts - Louis, the powerless tutor, and Robert, his cloth-manufacturing brother - also stand at odds to society\'s expectations. The novel is set in a period of social and political ferment, featuring class disenfranchisement, the drama of Luddite machine-breaking, and the divisive effects of the Napoleonic Wars. But Charlotte Brontës particular strength lies in exploring the hidden psychological drama of love, loss and the quest for identity. Personal and public agitation are brought together against the dramatic backdrop of her native Yorkshire. As always, Brontë challenges convention, exploring the limitations of social justice whilst telling not one but two love stories. Σελίδες: 528, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by Roger Clark, University of Kent at Canterbury. Translation by Charles E. Wilbour (1862). One of the great Classics of Western Literature, Les Misérables is a magisterial work which is rich in both character portrayal and meticulous historical description. Characters such as the absurdly criminalised Valjean, the street urchin Gavroche, the rascal Thenardier, the implacable detective Javert, and the pitiful figure of the prostitute Fantine and her daughter Cosette, have entered the pantheon of literary dramatis personae. Volume 2 of 2 Σελίδες: 512, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

Introduction and Notes by David Blair. University of Kent at Canterbury. It is 1757. Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of native Americans for possession of the same lands and between the native peoples and white colonisers. Through these layers of conflict Cooper threads a thrilling narrative, in which Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of a British commander on the front line of the colonial war, attempt to join their father. Thwarted by Magua, the sinister \'Indian runner\', they find help in the person of Hawkeye, the white woodsman, and his companions, the Mohican Chingachgook and Uncas, his son, the last of his tribe. Cooper\'s novel is full of vivid incident- pursuits through wild terrain, skirmishes, treachery and brutality- but reflects also on the interaction between the colonists and the native peoples. Through the character of Hawkeye, Cooper raises lasting questions about the practises of the American frontier and the eclipse of the indigenous cultures. Σελίδες: 384, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury. From its first publication in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has been printed in over 700 editions. It has inspired almost every conceivable kind of imitation and variation, and been the subject of plays, opera, cartoons, and computer games. The character of Crusoe has entered the consciousness of each succeeding generation as readers add their own interpretation to the adventures so thrillingly \'recorded\' by Defoe. Praised by eminent figures such as Coleridge, Rousseau and Wordsworth, this perennially popular book was cited by Karl Marx in Das Kapital to illustrate economic theory. However it is readers of all ages over the last 280 years who have given Robinson Crusoe its abiding position as a classic tale of adventure. Σελίδες: 272, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull. Thackeray\'s upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer. Although subtitled A Novel without a Hero, Vanity Fair follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives: through the retiring Amelia Sedley and the brilliant Becky Sharp, Thackeray examines the position of women in an intensely exploitative male world. When Vanity Fair was published in 1848, Charlotte Brontë commented: ‘The more I read Thackeray’sworks the more certain I am that he stands alone – alone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling… Thackeray is a Titan.’ Σελίδες: 720, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr. Jacqueline Belanger, University of Cardiff. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man represents the transitional stage between the realism of Joyce\'s Dubliners and the symbolism of Ulysses, and is essential to the understanding of the later work. This novel is a highly autobiographical account of the adolescence of Stephen Dedalus, who reappears in Ulysses, and who comes to realize that before he can become a true artist, he must rid himself of the stultifying effects of the religion, politics and essential bigotry of his background in late 19th century Ireland. Written with a light touch, this is perhaps the most accessible of Joyce’s works. Σελίδες: 272, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

Introduction and Notes by Dr Jeff Wallace, University of Glamorgan. Lawrence\'s finest, most mature novel initially met with disgust and incomprehension. In the love affairs of two sisters, Ursula with Rupert, and Gudrun with Gerald, critics could only see a sorry tale of sexual depravity and philosophical obscurity. Women in Love is, however, a profound response to a whole cultural crisis. The \'progress\' of the modern industrialised world had led to the carnage of the First World War. What, then, did it mean to call ourselves \'human\'? On what grounds could we place ourselves above and beyond the animal world? What are the definitive forms of our relationships - love, marriage, family, friendship - really worth? And how might they be otherwise? Without directly referring to the war, Women in Love explores these questions with restless energy. As a sequel to The Rainbow, the novel develops experimental techniques which made Lawrence one of the most important writers of the Modernist movement. Σελίδες: 464, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With a new Introduction by Professor Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D. The Forsyte Saga is Galsworthy’s enduringly popular masterpiece. Initially, the plot centres on Soames Forsyte, a successful solicitor living in London with his beautiful wife, Irene. A pillar of the late-Victorian upper middle class, wealthy and well-connected, he seems to lead an enviable life. But beneath the respectable exterior lie acute tensions and frustrations. The marriage of Soames and Irene culminates in sexual violence and recriminations. The consequent feud within the family will be long-lasting, with ironic and dramatic outcomes. In The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy analyses the achievements, confusions and hypocrisies of an era. This renowned chronicle of a divided dynasty, repeatedly filmed and televised, has engrossed audiences internationally. Σελίδες: 752, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by Keith Wren, University of Kent at Canterbury. The Man in the Iron Mask is the final episode in the cycle of novels featuring Dumas\' celebrated foursome of D\'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, who first appeared in The Three Musketeers. Some thirty-five years on, the bonds of comradeship are under strain as they end up on different sides in a power struggle that may undermine the young Louis XIV and change the face of the French monarchy. In the fast-paced narrative style that was his trademark, Dumas pitches us straight into the action. What is the secret shared by Aramis and Madame de Chevreuse? Why does the Queen Mother fear its revelation? Who is the mysterious prisoner in the Bastille? And what is the nature of the threat he poses? Dumas, the master storyteller, keeps us reading until the climactic scene in the grotto of Locmaria, a fitting conclusion to the epic saga of the musketeers. Σελίδες: 656, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by James Fowler, Senior Lecturer in French, University of Kent   Candide (1759) is a bright, colourful literary firework display of a novella. With sparkling wit and biting humour, Voltaire hits several targets with fierce and comic satire: organised religion, the overweening pride of aristocrats, merchants\' greed, colonial ambition and the hopeless complacency of Leibnizian philosophy that believes \'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds\'. Through this rites of passage story, with his central character, Candide, a naïve and impressionable young man, Voltaire attacks the social ills of his day, which remarkably remain as pertinent now as ever. Zadig is a tale of love and detection. Edgar Allan Poe was inspired by this story when he created C. Auguste Dupin in \'The Murders in the Rue Morgue\', a story which established the modern detective fiction genre. The Ingenu recounts how a young man raised by Huron Indians discover the ways of Europe.  Nanine is a sharp three act comedy concerned with marital dilemmas. In all these works Voltaire manages to combine humour with trenchant satire in a highly entertaining fashion. Σελίδες: 368, Διαστάσεις: 129x129cm

Major General Sir Richard Hannay is the fictional secret agent created by writer and diplomat John Buchan, who was himself an Intelligence officer during the First World War. The strong and silent type, combining the dour temperament of the Scot with the stiff upper lip of the Englishman, Hannay is pre-eminent among early spy-thriller heroes. Caught up in the first of these five gripping adventures just before the outbreak of war in 1914, he manages to thwart the enemy\'s evil plan and solve the mystery of the \'thirty-nine steps\'. In Greenmantle, he undertakes a vital mission to prevent jihad in the Islamic Near East. Mr Standfast, set in the decisive months of 1917-18, is the novel in which Hannay, after a life lived \'wholly among men\', finally falls in love; later, in The Three Hostages, he finds himself unravelling a kidnapping mystery with his wife\'s help. In the last adventure, The Island of Sheep, he is called upon to honour an old oath. A shrewd judge of men, he never dehumanises his enemy, and despite sharing some of the racial prejudices of his day, Richard Hannay is a worthy prototype hero of espionage fiction. Σελίδες: 992, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

\'Who could read the programme for the excursion without longing to make one of the party?\' So Mark Twain acclaims his voyage from New York City to Europe and the Holy Land in June 1867. His adventures produced The Innocents Abroad, a book so funny and provocative it made him an international star for the rest of his life. He was making his first responses to the Old World - to Paris, Milan, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, Constantinople, Sebastopol, Balaklava, Damascus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. For the first time he was seeing the great paintings and sculptures of the \'Old Masters\'. He responded with wonder and amazement, but also with exasperation, irritation, disbelief. Above all he displayed the great energy of his humour, more explosive for us now than for his beguiled contemporaries. Σελίδες: 464, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

‘As a man loved a woman, that was how I loved…It was good, good, good…’ Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parents – a fencer, a horse rider and a keen scholar. Stephen grows to be a war hero, a bestselling writer and a loyal, protective lover. But Stephen is a woman, and her lovers are women. As her ambitions drive her, and society confines her, Stephen is forced into desperate actions. The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity when published in 1928. It became an international bestseller, and for decades was the single most famous lesbian novel. It has influenced how love between women is understood, for the twentieth century and beyond. Σελίδες: 448, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel depicts nothing less than the great clashes between capital and labour, which arose from rapid industrialisation and problems of trade in the mid-nineteenth century. But these clashes are dramatized through personal struggles. John Barton has to reconcile his personal conscience with his socialist duty, risking his life and liberty in the process. His daughter Mary is caught between two lovers, from opposing classes – worker and manufacturer. And at the heart of the narrative lies a murder which implicates them all. Mary Barton was published in 1848, at a time of great social ferment in Europe, and it reflects its revolutionary moment through an English lens. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first novel about the world in which she lived – Manchester at the height of the industrial revolution. As the wife of a Unitarian minister she was solidly middle-class; but she also had close contact with the working classes around her, sympathised with them, and represented their extreme distresses in her fiction. She is radical in taking on their dialect, imagining the realities of their lives, and placing a working woman at the centre of her fiction. If to our eyes her vision remains limited, it was an honest vision, for which she was much criticised in her own time, by her own class. Σελίδες: 448, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

This volume brings together Virginia Woolf’s last two novels, The Years (1937) which traces the lives of members of a dispersed middle-class family between 1880 and 1937, and Between the Acts (1941), an account of a village pageant in the summer preceding the Second World War which successfully interweaves comedy, satire and disturbing observation. Rewriting the traditional family saga and the pageant, these unsettling novels provide extraordinary critiques of Englishness and English identity while pursuing compelling existentialist and psychological themes such as the nature of time, memory, personal relationships and sexual desire. Their tightly constructed narratives enable the reader to experience the fragmented lives of their characters and the difficulties that they have in communicating with each other and even understanding themselves. Read together, these novels illuminate each other in ways that will engage both the student and the general reader. Σελίδες: 448, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

A Room of One’s Own (1929) has become a classic feminist essay and perhaps Virginia Woolf’s best known work; The Voyage Out (1915) is highly significant as her first novel. Both focus on the place of women within the power structures of modern society. The essay lays bare the woman artist’s struggle for a voice, since throughout history she has been denied the social and economic independence assumed by men. Woolf’s prescription is clear: if a woman is to find creative expression equal to a man’s, she must have an independent income, and a room of her own. This is both an acute analysis and a spirited rallying cry; it remains surprisingly resonant and relevant in the 21st century. The novel explores these issues more personally, through the character of Rachel Vinrace, a young woman whose ‘voyage out’ to South America opens up powerful encounters with her fellow-travellers, men and women. As she begins to understand her place in the world, she finds the happiness of love, but also sees its brute power. Woolf has a sharp eye for the comedy of English manners in a foreign milieu; but the final undertow of the novel is tragic as, in some of her finest writing, she calls up the essential isolation of the human spirit. Σελίδες: 480, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by Lionel Kelly, University of Reading. This Side of Paradise tells the story of Amory Blaine, the only child of wealthy parents, whose journey from adolescence to adulthood follows him from prep school through to Princeton University, where his literary talents flourish, in contrast to his academic failure. A sequence of love affairs with beautiful young women are fatally damaged by the collapse of his family’s fortune, and the novel ends with him poised to face the challenge of making his own way in the world. Composed in an unconventional narrative mode, the novel is a rich fusion of satiric and romance idioms, and found a captivated audience on its publication in 1920. It made Fitzgerald rich and famous overnight. The Beautiful and Damned is a bleaker version of the corrosive power of wealth and its privileges, one of Fitzgerald’s abiding subjects. Anthony Patch, is heir to a huge fortune, whose marriage to the beautiful and indolent Gloria is increasingly shadowed by Anthony’s fall into alcoholism. Though he wins a lawsuit to gain his inheritance of millions of dollars, it is a pyrrhic victory, for he is now a physically and morally broken man. Σελίδες: 608, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

Jules Verne (1828-1905) was internationally famous as the author of novels based on ‘extraordinary voyages.’ His visionary use of new travel technologies inspired his readers to look to the industrial future rather than the remote past for their dreams of adventure. The popularity of his novels led directly to modern science fiction. In From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, Jules Verne turned the ancient fantasy of space flight into a believable technological possibility – an engineering dream for the industrial age. Directly inspired by Verne’s story, enthusiasts worked successfully at overcoming the practical difficulties, and within a century, human beings did indeed fly to the Moon. Curiously, however, Verne is unlikely to have thought it possible that a manned projectile could actually be fired out of a giant cannon, rising higher than the Moon, swinging around it, and then landing safely back on Earth. He had used the science of the day to construct a literary conjuring trick, a hoax, one of the most successful in all history. By skilful misdirection he drew the attention of readers away from weaknesses in the project. Read the book and you, too, will be fooled into accepting the realistic possibility in Verne’s time of that dream of flying to the Moon. Σελίδες: 448, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

Translated by Constance Garnett with an introduction by Anthony Briggs. Dostoevsky\'s fascination for mental breakdown and violence (20 murders in his four main novels) was based on his own life, and these two unmistakably autobiographical works bear this out. The House of the Dead is fiction, but based on his four years in a Siberian prison. An educated upper-class man is condemned to live among criminals and brutal guards, with arbitrary punishments, lousy food, disgusting living conditions, hard toil and many floggings. Somehow he avoids bitterness and recrimination; faith in humanity survives. With its breadth of characterisation, acute sense of detail and strong narrative interest, this work can still shock, entertain and inspire. In The Gambler we see the Russian community in a German spa town. Drawn to the casino, Alexey becomes obsessed with roulette. In a gripping story, full of psychological interest, his growing mania eclipses even his interest in Polina, a heroine of demonic and vibrant sexuality. Dostoevsky himself was rescued from a similar gambling obsession by the young stenographer who took down this work at his dictation and married him soon afterwards. Σελίδες: 480, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction by Anthony Briggs. Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood. Russia in the 1840s. There is a stranger in town, and he is behaving oddly. The unctuous Pavel Chichikov goes around the local estates buying up \'dead souls\'. These are the papers relating to serfs who have died since the last census, but who remain on the record and still attract a tax demand. Chichikov is willing to relieve their owners of the tax burden by buying the titles for a song. What he does not say is that he then proposes to take out a huge mortgage against these fictitious citizens and buy himself a nice estate in Eastern Russia. Will he get away with it? Who will rumble him? Does this narrative contain a deeper message about Russia itself or the spiritual health of humanity? There is much interest and some suspense in considering these issues, but the real pleasure of this story lies elsewhere. It is an enjoyable comic romp through a retarded part of a backward country, a picaresque series of grotesque portraits, situations and conversations described with Gogolian humour based mainly on hyperbole. This is, quite simply, the funniest book in the Russian language before the twentieth century. Σελίδες: 496, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

When fifteen-year-old orphan John Trenchard is banished by his Aunt Jane, he goes to live at the local inn with the mysterious Elzevir Block, whose son has been killed by Customs Officers. Unofficially adopted by Block, John comes to learn the reasons for the noises in the graveyard at night, of \'Blackbeard\' Mohune\'s lost treasure and Elzevir Block\'s secret. This dashing tale of eighteenth-century Dorset smugglers will be enjoyed by all who love stories of derring-do written in the tradition of Treasure Island. Σελίδες: 240, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

Introduction and Notes by Professor Stephen Arkin, San Francisco University. \'Young women who have no economic or political power must attend to the serious business of contriving material security\'. Jane Austen\'s sardonic humour lays bare the stratagems, the hypocrisy and the poignancy inherent in the struggle of two very different sisters to achieve respectability. Sense and Sensibility is a delightful comedy of manners in which the sisters Elinor and Marianne represent these two qualities. Elinor\'s character is one of Augustan detachment, while Marianne, a fervent disciple of the Romantic Age, learns to curb her passionate nature in the interests of survival. This book, the first of Austen’s novels to be published, remains as fresh a cautionary tale today as it ever was. Σελίδες: 320, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury. Tom Jones is widely regarded as one of the first and most influential English novels. It is certainly the funniest. Tom Jones, the hero of the book, is introduced to the reader as the ward of a liberal Somerset squire. Tom is a generous but slightly wild and feckless country boy with a weakness for young women. Misfortune, followed by many spirited adventures as he travels to London to seek his fortune, teach him a sort of wisdom to go with his essential good-heartedness. This ‘comic, epic poem in prose’ will make the modern reader laugh as much as it did his forbears. Its biting satire finds an echo in today’s society, for as Doris Lessing recently remarked ‘This country becomes every day more like the eighteenth century, full of thieves and adventurers, rogues and a robust, unhypocritical savagery side-by-side with people lecturing others on morality’. Σελίδες: 768, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

Written specially for the World Book Day Quick Reads promotion.\"My dad used to say to me, \'Try to keep a cool head and a warm heart\'. At least I think it was my dad. I don\'t really remember him.\"Gravy worked in the graveyard - hence the name. He was having a normal day until his friend Benjy turned up in a car Gravy didn\'t recognise. Benjy had a bullet hole in his chest, but lived just long enough to ask Gravy to hide him and look after his gun. Gravy had looked after things for Benjy before, but never a gun. When Gravy looked in the car he found blood, a balaclava and a bag stuffed with money. Gravy\'s not too bright but he wants to help his friend.So Gravy finds himself caught up in the middle of a robbery gone wrong, a woman who witnessed a murder, and some very unpleasant men who will do anything to get back the money Benjy stole... Σελίδες: 128, Έτος Έκδοσης: 0920, Διαστάσεις: 16x16cm

Written during her time as the inaugural fellow in the Beckett archive last year, Eimear McBride\'s three short, characteristically brilliant texts - collected in one work, Mouthpieces.Each text depicts a fragment of female experience, all of them told in in Eimear\'s vivid, original and sharp-witted style. In \'The Adminicle Exists\', we hear the inner voice of a woman who saves her troubled, dangerous partner; in \'An Act of Violence\', a woman is quizzed about her reaction to a man\'s death; in \'The Eye Machine\', the character \'Eye\' tells of her imprisonment, flickering through a slideshow of female stereotypes. Σελίδες: 48, Διαστάσεις: 11.1x11.1cm

Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka’s world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is. The Trial, where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials, and if there is any help to be had, it will come from unexpected sources, is a chilling, blackly amusing tale that maintains, to the very end, a relentless atmosphere of disorientation. Superficially about bureaucracy, it is in the last resort a description of the absurdity of \'normal\' human nature. Still more enigmatic is The Castle. Is it an allegory of a quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject? The search by a central European Jew for acceptance into a dominant culture? A spiritual quest for grace or salvation? An individual\'s struggle between his sense of independence and his need for approval? Is it all of these things? And K? Is he opportunist, victim, or an outsider battling against elusive authority? Finally, in his fables, Kafka deals in dark and quirkily humorous terms with the insoluble dilemmas of a world which offers no reassurance, and no reliable guidance to resolving our existential and emotional uncertainties and anxieties. Σελίδες: 640, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Merchant, Canterbury Christchurch University College The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful and sometimes violent novel of expectation, love, oppression, sin, religion and betrayal. It portrays the disintegration of the marriage of Helen Huntingdon, the mysterious ‘tenant’ of the title, and her dissolute, alcoholic husband. Defying convention, Helen leaves her husband to protect their young son from his father’s influence, and earns her own living as an artist. Whilst in hiding at Wildfell Hall, she encounters Gilbert Markham, who falls in love with her. On its first publication in 1848, Anne Brontë’s second novel was criticised for being ‘coarse’ and ‘brutal’. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall challenges the social conventions of the early nineteenth century in a strong defence of women’s rights in the face of psychological abuse from their husbands. Anne Brontë’s style is bold, naturalistic and passionate, and this novel, which her sister Charlotte considered ‘an entire mistake’, has earned Anne a position in English literature in her own right, not just as the youngest member of the Brontë family. This newly reset text is taken from a copy of the 1848 second edition in the Library of the Brontë Parsonage Museum and has been edited to correct known errors in that edition. Σελίδες: 432, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. A Pair of Blue Eyes, though early in the sequence of Hardy\'s novels, is lively and gripping. Its dramatic cliff-hanging episode, for example, is at once tense, ironic, feministic and erotic. With settings in Wessex and London, the novel also has some strongly autobiographical features, as the blue-eyed heroine, Elfride Swancourt, is based largely on Emma Gifford, who became Thomas Hardy\'s first wife. Elfride\'s vivacious nature attracts several lovers, but she is beset by sexual prejudice, and the ensuing ironies reveal the constraints of her times. A Pair of Blue Eyes provides an engaging and moving experience for today\'s readers. Σελίδες: 336, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

Introduction and Notes by Norman Vance, Professor of English, University of Sussex. Jude Fawley is a rural stone mason with intellectual aspirations. Frustrated by poverty and the indifference of the academic institutions at the University of Christminster, his only chance of fulfilment seems to lie in his relationship with his unconventional cousin, Sue Bridehead. But life as social outcasts proves undermining, and when tragedy occurs, Sue has no resilience and Jude is left in despair. Hardy’s portrait of Jude, the idealist and dreamer who is a prisoner of his own physical nature, is one of the most haunting and desperate of his creations. Jude the Obscure is a dark yet compassionate account of the insurmountable frustrations of human existence which reflect Hardy’s yearning for the spiritual values of the past and his despair at their decline. Σελίδες: 416, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by Karl Ashley Smith, University of St Andrews.   Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz). Mr Dombey is a man obsessed with his firm. His son is groomed from birth to take his place within it, despite his visionary eccentricity and declining health. But Dombey also has a daughter, whose unfailing love for her father goes unreturned. \'Girls\' said Mr Dombey, \'have nothing to do with Dombey and Son\'. When Walter Gay, a young clerk in her father\'s office, rescues her from a bewildering experience in the streets of London, his unforgettable friends believe he is well on his way to receiving her hand in marriage and inheriting the company. It is to be a very different type of story. Dombey and Son moved grown men to tears (Thackeray despaired of ‘writing against such power as this’), but its rich, comic characters and their joyful explosions of language draw laughter with equally unerring magic. Σελίδες: 848, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by David Blair. From its first publication in 1816 Rob Roy has been recognised as containing some of Scott\'s finest writing and most engaging, fully realised characters. The outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor was already a legendary, disputed figure by the time Scott wrote - a heroic Scottish Robin Hood to some, an over-glamorised, unprincipled predator to others. Scott approaches Rob Roy indirectly, through the adventures of his fictional hero, Frank Osbaldistone, amid the political turmoil of England and Scotland in 1715. With characteristic care Scott reconstructs the period and settings so as to place Rob Roy and the Scotland he inhabits amid conflicting moral, economic and historical forces. This edition features, besides a new critical introduction and extensive explanatory notes, an essay outlining clearly the novel\'s historical context and a glossary of Scottish words and phrases used by Scott\'s colourful, vernacular characters. Σελίδες: 448, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by Charles P.C. Pettit. Thomas Hardy\'s only historical novel, The Trumpet Major is set in Wessex during the Napoleonic Wars. Hardy skilfully immerses us in the life of the day, making us feel the impact of historical events on the immemorial local way of life - the glamour of the coming of George III and his soldiery, fears of the press-gang and invasion, and the effect of distant but momentous events like the Battle of Trafalgar. He interweaves a compelling, bitter-sweet romantic love story of the rivalry of two brothers for the hand of the heroine Anne Garland, played out against the loves of a lively gallery of other characters. While there are elements of sadness and even tragedy, The Trumpet-Major shows Hardy\'s skills of story-telling, characterisation and description in a novel of vitality, comedy and warmth. Σελίδες: 288, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by Merry M. Pawlowski, Professor and Chair, Department of English, California State University, Bakersfield. Virginia Woolf\'s Orlando \'The longest and most charming love letter in literature\', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf\'s close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth\'s England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Costantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women. Σελίδες: 192, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm

With an Introduction and Notes by Claire Seymour, University of Kent at Canterbury. The Return of the Native is widely recognised as the most representative of Hardy\'s Wessex novels. He evokes the dismal presence and menacing beauty of Egdon Heath - reaching out to touch the lives and fate of all who dwell on it. The central figure is Clym Yeobright, the returning ‘native’ and the story tells of his love for the beautiful but capricious Eustacia Vye. As the narrative unfolds and character after character is driven to self-destruction the presence of the Heath becomes all-embracing, while Clym becomes a travelling preacher in an attempt to assuage his guilt. Σελίδες: 400, Διαστάσεις: 12.9x12.9cm