This boxset contains seven books, together creating a comprehensive collection of the Brontë Sisters’ best and much-loved works. Beautifully packaged in a ridged, matt-laminated slipcase with metallic detailing, complete with strikingly attractive, bespoke artwork, this is the perfect gift for any Brontë Sisters lover.
Includes:
Agnes Grey
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Jane Eyre
The Professor
Shirley
Villette
Wuthering Heights
The Little Prince is a classic tale of equal appeal to children and adults. On one level it is the story of an airman's discovery, in the desert, of a small boy from another planet - the Little Prince of the title - and his stories of intergalactic travel, while on the other hand it is a thought-provoking allegory of the human condition.
Each box set contains seven books, together creating a comprehensive collection of the notorious detective’s best cases and adventures.
Beautifully packaged in a ridged, matt-laminated slipcase with metallic detailing, complete with strikingly attractive, bespoke artwork.
Includes:
Adventures & Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Best of Sherlock Holmes
Casebook of Sherlock Holmes & His Last Bow
Hound of the Baskervilles & The Valley of Fear
Return of Sherlock Holmes
Shadows of Sherlock Holmes
Study in Scarlet & Sign of the Four
The Shadows of Sherlock Holmes is a fascinating collection of stories featuring detectives, criminal agents and debonair crooks from the golden age of crime fiction: a time when Sherlock Holmes was esconsced in his rooms at 221B Baker Street and London was permanently wreathed in a sinister fog. These gripping tales of mystery, suspense and clever puzzles are wonderfully entertaining and in them you will meet The Crime Doctor, Professor Augustus S.F.X.Van Dusen - The Thinking Machine, Max Carrados - the incredible blind detective, the repulsive but brilliant Skin o' My Teeth, and the natty, ingenious French sleuth Eugene Valmont. On the other side of the law, there are gentleman crooks Raffles and Simon Carn - the Prince of Swindlers. The stories include: ''The Purloined Letter' by Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Stolen Cigar Case' by Bret Harte, 'The Swedish Match' by Anton Chekhov, 'Nine Points of the Law' by E.W. Hornung, 'The Ghost at Massingham Mansions' by Ernest Bramah and 'The Great Pearl Mystery' by Baroness Orczy.
In this famous story of seduction, two highly intelligent but amoral French aristocrats plot the downfall of a respectable young married woman and a fifteen year old girl who has only just emerged from the convent. The letters these two conspirators exchange are remarkably frank in describing how they manage to achieve their ends and, at the same time, reveal nuances of character which make it impossible to dismiss either of them as simply evil. Those written by their victims are equally revelatory in a quite different and subtle way, while the manner in which Laclos handles the epistolary form in order to ensure that his two protagonists are finally defeated, not by outside forces, but the fissures in their own relationship, is a triumph of narrative skill. This novel poses shrewd questions about the relation between love and sex, and suggests that, in certain sections of eighteenth century French high society, idleness, boredom and wealth had created individuals whose misfortunes it would be hard to regret when, only seven years after Dangerous Liaisons was published, the Revolution broke out.
When Princess Irene and her nursemaid stay out too late one night and are chased home by goblins, a young miner boy called Curdie comes to their rescue. So begins a fantastic adventure in which Irene and Curdie must try to stop a goblin invasion, helped by Irene's mysterious great-great-grandmother. This much-loved tale was a personal favourite of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. This edition includes the sequel, The Princess and Curdie.
Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan who has hung on determinedly to an optimistic spirit and a wildly creative imagination through her early deprivations. She erupts into the lives of aging brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a girl instead of the boy they had sent for. Thus begins a story of transformation for all three; indeed the whole rural community of Avonlea comes under Anne's influence in some way. We see her grow from a girl to a young woman of sixteen, making her mistakes, and not always learning from them. Intelligent, hot-headed as her own red hair, unwilling to take a moral truth as read until she works it out for herself, she must also face grief and loss and learn the true meaning of love. Part Tom Sawyer, part Jane Eyre, by the end of Anne of Green Gables, Anne has become the heroine of her own story.
The sequel, Anne of Avonlea, follows her progress as a teacher as she seeks to put into practice the lessons she has learnt, helping at the same time to keep Green Gables going, pursuing her enduring friendships, and finding first love where she least expects it.
Both books conjure an enchanting landscape of wild blossom, lakes and brooks, woods and ocean, seen through Anne's 'beauty-loving eyes', whose vision of the world she brings us to share.
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.
The tough-mindedness of the social satire in and its air of palpable integrity give this novel a special place in Anthony Trollope's Literary career. Trollope paints a picture as panoramic as his title promises, of the life of 1870s London, the loves of those drawn to and through the city, and the career of Augustus Melmotte. Melmotte is one of the Victorian novel's greatest and strangest creations, and is an achievement undimmed by the passage of time.
Trollope's 'Now' might, in the twenty-first century, look like some distant disenchanted 'Then', but this is still the yesterday which we must understand in order to make proper sense of our today.
Washington Square marks the culmination of James's apprentice period as a novelist. With sharply focused attention upon just four principal characters, James provides an acute analysis of middle-class manners and behaviour in the New York of the 1870's, a period of great change in the life of the city. This change is explored through the device of setting the novel's action during the 1840s, similarly a period of considerable turbulence as the United States experienced the onset of rapid commercial and industrial expansion.
Through the relationships between Austin Sloper, a celebrated physician, and his sister Lavinia Penniman, his daughter Catherine, and Catherine's suitor, Morris Townsend, James observes the contemporary scene as a site of competing styles and performances where authentic expression cannot be articulated or is subject to suppression.
The Wonderful World of the Wizard of Oz, which the the Library of Congress named as 'America's greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale', is one of the great works of children's literature.
The story concerns Dorothy, a young girl from Kansas, who, with her little dog Toto, is caught up in a terrifying tornado, which whisks her far away to the magical land of Oz. Here she encounters the Munchkins, strange small creatures, who tell her that in order for her to return home she must follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City and seek out the mysterious Wizard of Oz. On the journey she encounters the Tin Woodman, the brainless Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, each of whom wish to make a request of the Wizard. After several adventures, including an encounter with a deadly poppy field and being chased by winged monkeys, the travellers reach the Emerald City. The story rolls along at a tremendous pace in clear and engaging prose, which has helped the novel to become a perennial favourite with children. The appeal of the kaleidoscopic world of the land of Oz with all its incredible and fantastic elements and characters has great appeal to the unfettered mind of the young – and indeed those grown-ups who still retain a romantic imagination.
No nineteenth-century American writer can claim to be as modern as Henry David Thoreau. His central preoccupations – the illusory nature of much of what we call ‘progress’, the proper symbiotic relationship between man and the natural environment, the limitations of government, especially where it seeks to intrude on the personal, the moral and political case for non-violence, the dubious pleasures of material comforts, our intoxication with excess, our unrelenting search for the ‘rules’ by which we might live our lives – these, and many other matters are as real to us now as they were to Thoreau in 1845 when he began his experiment in self-sufficiency. Walden is his autobiographical record of his life of relative isolation at Walden Pond, some twenty miles west of the city of Boston, but it is also a work of detailed natural history and the expression of a philosophy of life by a deeply poetic sensibility. His essay (originally a lecture), ‘Civil Disobedience’, has over the 150 or so years since its publication exerted an enormous influence, animating thinkers such as Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi as well as political movements such as the British Labour Party, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and various forms of oppositional activism across the globe.
Walden and ‘Civil Disobedience’ are reprinted here in a new edition alongside three of Thoreau’s seminal essays, ‘Slavery in Massachusetts’, ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’, and ‘Life Without Principle’. Henry Claridge’s introduction illuminates the extent to which Thoreau’s writings and his thinking were a response to the dramatic changes wrought by the physical expansion of the United States and the migration of European peoples across the American sub-continent in the first half of the nineteenth-century. The edition also comes with a bibliography and extensive explanatory notes.
Translated by F Max-Muller, revised and with an Introduction by Suren Navlakha.
Upanishads are mankind's oldest works of philosophy, predating the earliest Greek philosophy. They are the concluding part of the Vedas, the ancient Indian sacred literature, and mark the culmination of a tradition of speculative thought first expressed in the Rig-Veda more than 4000 years ago. Remarkable for their meditative depth, spirit of doubt and intellectual honesty, the Upanishads are concerned with the knowledge of the Brahman, the Ultimate Reality, and Man's relationship with it.
The name Upanishad is derived from the face-to-face mode of imparting knowledge - in the utmost sanctity and secrecy, to prevent its trivialisation or perversion. Composed in Sanskrit between 900 and 600 BC, the Upanishads presented here are by far the oldest and most important of those that exist. Twelve were first translated more than a hundred years ago, and have been extensively revised and edited. The thirteenth is an entirely new translation by Suren Navlakha.
As Angus Calder states in his introduction to this edition, 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War'. Lawrence's younger brothers, Frank and Will, had been killed on the Western Front in 1915. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, written between 1919 and 1926, tells of the vastly different campaign against the Turks in the Middle East - one which encompasses gross acts of cruelty and revenge and ends in a welter of stink and corpses in the disgusting 'hospital' in Damascus.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is no Boys Own Paper tale of Imperial triumph, but a complex work of high literary aspiration which stands in the tradition of Melville and Dostoevsky, and alongside the writings of Yeats, Eliot and Joyce.
Njal's Saga is the finest of the Icelandic sagas, and one of the world's greatest prose works. Written c.1280, about events a couple of centuries earlier, it is divided into three parts: the first recounts the touching friendship between noble Gunnar and the statesman Njal, together with the fatal enmity between their wives. The second part works out the central tragedy of the saga, while the third describes the retribution wrought by Flosi and Kari.
The saga is remarkable not only for the details of everyday life - the farming, the feasting and the charcoal-burning - but also for the social structure of the society in which that life took place - the Althing or Parliament, the lawmaking and the lawgiving. The grandeur of the narrative and the beauty and distinction of the characters mark Njal's Saga as an essential text for all who love adventure and great literature.
London Labour and the London Poor is a masterpiece of personal inquiry and social observation. It is the classic account of life below the margins in the greatest Metropolis in the world and a compelling portrait of the habits, tastes, amusements, appearance, speech, humour, earnings and opinions of the labouring poor at the time of the Great Exhibition.
In scope, depth and detail it remains unrivalled. Mayhew takes us into the abyss, into a world without fixed employment where skills are declining and insecurity mounting, a world of criminality, pauperism and vice, of unorthodox personal relations and fluid families, a world from which regularity is absent and prosperity has departed. Making sense of this environment required curiosity, imagination and a novelist's eye for detail, and Henry Mayhew possessed all three.
No previous writer had succeeded in presenting the poor through their own stories and in their own words, and in this undertaking Mayhew rivals his contemporary Dickens. 'To pass from one to the other', writes one authority,' is to cross sides of the same street'.
Since its first publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan has been recognised as one of the most compelling, and most controversial, works of political philosophy written in English. Forged in the crucible of the civil and religious warfare of the mid-seventeenth century, it proposes a political theory that combines an unequivocal commitment to natural human liberty with the conviction that the sovereign power of government must be exercised absolutely. Leviathan begins from some shockingly naturalistic starting-points: an analysis of human nature as being motivated by vain-glory and pride, and a vision of religion as simply the fear of invisible powers made up by the mind. Yet from these deliberately unpromising elements, Hobbes constructs with unparalleled forcefulness an elaborate, systematic, and comprehensive account of how political society ought to be: ordered, law-bound, peaceful. In Leviathan, Hobbes presents us with a portrait of politics which depicts how a state that is made up of the unified body of all its citizens will be powerful, fruitful, protective of each of its members, and − above all − free from internal violence.
The legend of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table is one of the most enduring and influential stories in world literature. Its themes - love, war, religion, treachery and family loyalty - are timeless, as are the reputations of its major characters, Arthur, Merlin, Guenever and Launcelot.
Malory's Le Morte Darthur is a story of noble knights, colourful tournaments and fateful love, set in a courtly society which is outwardly secure and successful, but in reality torn by dissent and, ultimately, treachery. Originally published in 1485, Malory's Le Morte Darthur is here presented in modern spelling and is accompanied by an Introduction and helpful Glossary.
Sigmund Freud's audacious masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, has never ceased to stimulate controversy since its publication in 1900.
Freud is acknowledged as the founder of psychoanalysis, the key to unlocking the human mind, a task which has become essential to man's survival in the twentieth century, as science and technology have rushed ahead of our ability to cope with their consequences.
Freud saw that man is at war with himself and often unable to tolerate too much reality. He propounded the theory that dreams are the contraband representations of the beast within man, smuggled into awareness during sleep. In Freudian interpretation, the analysis of dreams is the key to unlocking the secrets of the unconscious mind.
Democracy in America is a classic of political philosophy. Hailed by John Stuart Mill and Horace Greely as the finest book ever written on the nature of democracy, it continues to be an influential text on both sides of the Atlantic, above all in the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe.
De Tocqueville examines the structures, institutions and operation of democracy, and shows how Europe can learn from American success and failures. His central theme is the advancement of the rule of the people, but he also predicts that slavery will bring about the 'most horrible of civil wars', foresees that the USA and Russia will be the Superpowers of the twentieth century, and is 150 years ahead of his time in his views on the position and importance of women.
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