When Lady Ombersley agrees to take in her young niece, no one expects Sophy, who sweeps in and immediately takes the ton by storm. Sophy discovers that her aunt's family is in desperate need of her talent for setting everything right: Ceclia is in love with a poet, Charles has tyrannical tendencies that are being aggravated by his grim fiancee, her uncle is of no use at all, and the younger children are in desperate need of some fun and freedom. By...

"In 1872 the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This gave Tolstoy the starting point he needed for composing what many believe to be the greatest novel ever written. In writing Anna Karenina he moved away from the vast historical sweep of War and Peace to tell, with extraordinary understanding, the story of an aristocratic woman who brings ruin on herself. Anna's tragedy is interwoven...

"When Dr. Croft takes in orphan Eleanor Beady, he doesn't realize that he's gained an apprentice. Raised amidst Croft's experiments, "Nora" becomes his most trusted assistant-an unthinkable and unlawful pursuit for a woman. Nora helps Croft's groundbreaking research and his clinic gain recognition, and she finds she doesn't mind working in the background, as long as she can continue to hone her skills. But the arrival of a new surgical resident threatens...

As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, the protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls and recieves cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man.

Algernon pretends to be Jack's troublesome younger brother, in Wilde's satirical assault on nineteenth-century fashions, manners, and morality.

When Katherine "Kit" FitzGilbert turned her back on London society more than a decade ago, she determined never to set foot in a ballroom again. But when business takes her to London and she's forced to run for her life, she stumbles upon not only a glamorous ballroom but also Graham, Lord Wharton. What should have been a chance encounter becomes much more as Graham embarks on a search for his friend's missing sister and is convinced Kit knows more...

The second of Trollope's "Palliser" novels introduces its title character, Phineas Finn, a talented but naive doctor's son from Ireland with Parliamentary aspirations. He must make numerous practical and ethical choices regarding his career, his political beliefs, and his romantic life, in hopes of emerging with his character, reputation, and prospects intact.

This updated authoritative edition of the classic Hardy novel, which was published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, is set from Hardy's revised, unedited final draft of 1912 and features a new Introduction and Afterword. There is in England no more real or typical district than Thomas Hardy's imaginary Wessex, the scattered fields and farms of which were first discovered in Far from the Madding Crowd. It is here that Gabriel Oak observes...

With Mr. Dashwood's death, his wife and two daughters, Elinor and Marianne, must accustom themselves to genteel poverty. When Marianne meets the man of her dreams, everyone expects a marriage; unaccountably, he rejects her, with devastating effect. It falls to Elinor, the sensible elder sister, to pick up the pieces, while harboring a secret longing of her own. In Sense and Sensibility, the warmth between two very different sisters contrasts with...

The brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery uncontainable Lila have made life's great discoveries, its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up-- a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Now, in a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous-- and in a world undergoing epochal change-- Lila and Elena clash, drift apart, reconcile, and clash again, in the process...