Wordsworth

This story tells of the happy discovery of the wonders of natural history by a family shipwrecked on a desert island, who remain united through all the adversities they encounter.Inspired by Robinson Crusoe, this joyful narrative by a Swiss pastor remains a classic tale to be enjoyed by all....

Few works of American fiction have proved as enduringly popular as Harold Bell Wright's The Shepherd of the Hills.  Wright's novel, first published in 1907, was an instant best seller; by 1918 the book had sold over two million copies; the following year it was adapted for the silent screen (the first of four cinematic versions); and by the...

The Sea-Wolf belongs in the honorific tradition of American sea fiction where the voyage motif became a means of exploring the meaning of life, as in Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840), Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851). The dominant subject is an intellectual...

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...

The Red Badge of Courage is one of the greatest war novels of all time. It reports on the American Civil War through the eyes of Henry Fleming, an ordinary farm boy turned soldier. It evokes the chaos and the dull clatter of war: the acrid smoke, the incessant rumours of coming battles, the filth and cold, the numbing monotony, the unworldly...

The Red and the Black has been hailed as the first great 'realist' novel of the nineteenth century, offering a lively and detailed picture of social and political life in the provinces and in Paris towards the end of the 1820s, the close of the stifling reactionary period of the Bourbon Restoration. Stendhal himself claimed that no-one before him...