The Bell

Horror was my familiar.
Published the same year as her first novel, Adam Bede, this overlooked work displays the gifts for which George Eliot would become famous—gritty realism, psychological insight, and idealistic moralizing. It is unique from all her other writing, however, in that it represents the only time she ever used a first-person narrator, and it is the only time she wrote about the supernatural.

The tale...

Two years after his wife's death, Germain is encouraged to move on and find a new woman and home to accommodate his three growing children. He travels to visit a single woman who is eager to start a new family. Following his daughter's death, Père Maurice has provided constant support for his son-in-law Germain. But after two years, he pushes him to find a new wife. Germain is a young man with three children in need of a mother. Maurice sends him...

Three novellas that brilliantly portray English country and clergy life at the turn of the nineteenth century from the author of Middlemarch.
 
Initially appearing in Blackwood’s Magazine, this trio of linked stories comprises George Eliot’s first published work. Together they form a portrait of small-town life in Midlands, England, where changes are affecting both society at large and religious beliefs...

"Poet and soldier, brawler and charmer, Cyrano de Bergerac is desperately in love with Roxane, the most beautiful girl in Paris. But there is one very large problem - he has a nose of stupendous size and believes she will never see past it to return his feelings. So when he discovers that the handsome but tongue-tied and dim-witted Christian is also pining for Roxane, generous Cyrano offers to help by writing exquisite declarations of love for the...

The Confessions of Arsène Lupin (1913) is a collection of short stories by Maurice Leblanc. Blending crime fiction, fantasy, and mystery, Leblanc crafts original and entertaining tales of adventure starring one of the greatest literary characters of all time, Arsène Lupin, gentleman thief. Partly based on the life of French anarchist Marius Jacob, Lupin first appeared in print in 1905 as an answer to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Arsène...

Ibsen's classic psychological drama is accompanied by full commentary, notes, and questions for further study.

First staged in 1906, "The Doctor's Dilemma" is a play that revolves around a community of doctors, most specializing, unbeknownst to them, in different types of expensive, fraudulent treatments. Dr. Ridgeon, who has actually discovered a vaccine for tuberculosis, is conflicted about administering his limited remedy, for the husband of a woman he is in love with can pay, but his kind yet poverty-stricken colleague Dr. Blenkinsop cannot. Shaw's drama...

From the author of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, a travelogue of a journey with his wife that offers a glimpse of post–World War I Europe.
After the First World War, when D. H. Lawrence was living in Sicily, he traveled to Sardinia and back in January 1921. This record of what he saw on that journey, Sea and Sardinia, not only reveals his response to new landscapes, new people, and his ability to capture their

...

Tells the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing into manhood in a British working-class community near the Nottingham coalfields. His mother Gertrude, unhappily married to Paul's hard-drinking father, devotes all her energies to her son. They develop a powerful and passionate relationship, but eventually tensions arise when Paul falls in love with a girl and seeks to escape his family ties. Torn between his desire for independence and his abiding...

"Henrik Ibsen's play, A Doll's House, originally published in 1879, significantly explores female identity and societal expectations, themes later expanded in Hedda Gabler (1891), and challenges the roles traditional to men and women in marriage. Set in Norway during the late 19th century, its reception was controversial at the time of its release given the limited prospects for women in society"--Page [4] of cover.