Modern Library

The Wrong Side of Paris, the final novel in Balzacs The Human Comedy, is the compelling story of Godefroid, an abject failure at thirty, who seeks refuge from materialism by moving into a monastery-like lodging house in the shadows of Notre-Dame. Presided over by Madame de La Chanterie, a noblewoman with a tragic past, the house is inhabited by a...

Like the celebrated Klondike Tales, the stories that comprise South Sea Tales derive their intensity from the authors own far-flung adventures, conveying an impassioned, unsparing vision borne only of experience. The powerful tales gathered here vividly evoke the turn-of-the-century colonial Pacific and its capricious tropical landscape, while also...

A History of AdventureA runaway bestseller on its publication in 1887, H. Rider Haggards She is a Victorian thrill ride of a novel, featuring a lost African kingdom ruled by a mysterious, implacable queen; ferocious wildlife and yawning abysses; and an eerie love story that spans two thousand years. She has bewitched readers from Freud and Jung to...

First published to critical acclaim in 1929, Passing firmly established Nella Larsen's prominence among women writers of the Harlem Renaissance. The Modern Library is proud to present Passingan electrifying story of two women who cross the color line in 1920s New Yorktogether with a new Introduction by the Obie Award- winning playwright and...

Emma, Northanger Abbey, PersuasionThe second volume in the Complete Novels of Jane Austen, this volume contains the classics Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion....

Villette! Villette! Have you read it? exclaimed George Eliot when Charlotte Bront's final novel appeared in 1853. It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.Arguably Bront's most refined and deeply felt work, Villette draws on her profound loneliness following the deaths of her three...