When Jerry, Jimmy and Cathy discover a tunnel that leads to a castle, they pretend that it is enchanted. But when they discover a Sleeping Princess at the centre of a maze, astonishing things begin to happen. Amongst a horde of jewels they discover a ring that grants wishes.
But wishes granted are not always wishes wanted, so the children find themselves grappling with invisibility, dinosaurs, a ghost and the fearsome Ugli-Wuglies before it is all resolved.
This edition of The Enchanted Castle has forty-seven evocative illustrations by H.R. Millar.
Cervantes’ tale of the deranged gentleman who turns knight-errant, tilts at windmills and battles with sheep in the service of the lady of his dreams, Dulcinea del Toboso, has fascinated generations of readers, and inspired other creative artists such as Flaubert, Picasso and Richard Strauss. The tall, thin knight and his short, fat squire, Sancho Panza, have found their way into films, cartoons and even computer games.
Supposedly intended as a parody of the most popular escapist fiction of the day, the ‘books of chivalry’, this precursor of the modern novel broadened and deepened into a sophisticated, comic account of the contradictions of human nature. On his ‘heroic’ journey Don Quixote meets characters of every class and condition, from the prostitute Maritornes, who is commended for her Christian charity, to the Knight of the Green Coat, who seems to embody some of the constraints of virtue.
Cervantes’ greatest work can be enjoyed on many levels, all suffused with a subtle irony that reaches out to encompass the reader, and does not leave the author outside its circle.
Peter Motteux’s fine eighteenth-century translation, acknowledged as one of the best, brilliantly succeeds in communicating the spirit of the original Spanish.
The narrator of The War of the Worlds is quick to discover that what appeared to be a falling star was, in fact, a metallic cylinder landing from Mars. Six million people begin to flee London in panic as tentacled invaders emerge and overpower the city. With their heat-ray, killing machines, black gas, and a taste for fresh human blood, is there anything that can be done to stop the Martians?
In The War in the Air, naive but resourceful Bert Smallways is thrilled by speed and fascinated by the new flying machines. His curiosity sweeps him away by accident into a German plan to conquer America, beginning with the destruction of New York. The ease of movement in aerial warfare means that nothing and nobody is safe as Total War erupts, civilisation crumbles, and Bert's hopes of getting back to London to marry his love seem impossibly distant.
In these 'scientific romances' H. G. Wells sees the present reflected in the future and the future in the present. His aim is to provoke rather than predict. The Sleeper falls into a trance, waking up two centuries later as the richest man in a world of new technologies, power-greedy leaders, sensual elites, and brutalised industrial slaves. Arriving in the year 802,701, the Time-Traveller finds that humanity has evolved into two drastically different species; going farther still, he witnesses the ultimate fate of the solar system. The Chronic Argonauts, the original version of The Time Machine, pits a scientist with daring views of time and space against superstitious villagers. In all three works Wells laces vivid adventure stories with the latest ideas in biology and physics.
At the end of the nineteenth century a stranger arrives in the Sussex countryside and mayhem ensues; in the sleepy county of Kent a miracle food brings biological chaos that engulfs and threatens the entire planet. H. G. Wells's fertile and mercurial imagination never brought us more bizarre and unsettling stories than those revealed in The Invisible Man (1897) and The Food of the Gods, and How It Came to Earth (1904). These are stories of extraordinary physical transformations and are at once extremely funny and richly imaginative. At the same time, Wells poses some very probing questions about the ethical dimensions to science and the human capacity for both pity and cruelty. Brought together for the first time in this new Wordsworth edition, The Invisible Man and The Food of the Gods are two of Wells's most entertaining and thought-provoking works.
Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka’s world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is. The Trial, where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials, and if there is any help to be had, it will come from unexpected sources, is a chilling, blackly amusing tale that maintains, to the very end, a relentless atmosphere of disorientation. Superficially about bureaucracy, it is in the last resort a description of the absurdity of 'normal' human nature.
Still more enigmatic is The Castle. Is it an allegory of a quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject? The search by a central European Jew for acceptance into a dominant culture? A spiritual quest for grace or salvation? An individual's struggle between his sense of independence and his need for approval? Is it all of these things? And K? Is he opportunist, victim, or an outsider battling against elusive authority?
Based on Charlotte Brontë's personal experience as a teacher in Brussels, Villette is a moving tale of repressed feelings and subjection to cruel circumstance and position, borne with heroic fortitude.
Rising above the frustrations of confinement within a rigid social order, it is also the story of a woman's right to love and be loved.
‘As a man loved a woman, that was how I loved…It was good, good, good…’
Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parents – a fencer, a horse rider and a keen scholar. Stephen grows to be a war hero, a bestselling writer and a loyal, protective lover. But Stephen is a woman, and her lovers are women. As her ambitions drive her, and society confines her, Stephen is forced into desperate actions. The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity when published in 1928. It became an international bestseller, and for decades was the single most famous lesbian novel. It has influenced how love between women is understood, for the twentieth century and beyond.
The Professor is Charlotte Brontës first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and consciousness of a man, William Crimsworth. Like Jane Eyre he is parentless; like Lucy Snowe in Villette he leaves the certainties of England to forge a life in Brussels. But as a man, William has freedom of action, and as a writer Brontë is correspondingly liberated, exploring the relationship between power and sexual desire.
William's first person narration reveals his attraction to the dominating directress of the girls' school where he teaches, played out in the school's 'secret garden'. Balanced against this is his more temperate relationship with one of his pupils, Frances Henri, in which mastery and submission interplay. The Professor was published only after Charlotte Brontës death; today it gives us a fascinating insight into the first stirrings of her supreme creative imagination.
This is the first paperback edition to bring out in one volume Kate Chopin’s extraordinary novel The Awakening (1899), along with the complete text of her two collections of short stories, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), and twelve uncollected tales.
The Awakening is a strikingly modern, evocative story of self-discovery and female emancipation, set in the sensuous environment of Southern Louisiana, where the young Edna Pontellier reclaims her own individuality, refusing to be defined by her roles of wife and mother.
Chopin’s stories are brilliantly observed, compassionate and often humorous, alert to the foibles, weaknesses and small triumphs of her characters. Overshadowed by the relatively recent fame of The Awakening, they contain some of the best work of this remarkably original author.
Notes from Underground and Other Stories is a comprehensive collection of Dostoevsky’s short fiction. Many of these stories, like his great novels, reveal his special sympathy for the solitary and dispossessed, explore the same complex psychological issues and subtly combine rich characterization and philosophical meditations on the (often) dark areas of the human psyche, all conveyed in an idiosyncratic blend of deadly seriousness and wild humour. In Notes from Underground, the Underground Man casually dismantles utilitarianism and celebrates in its stead a perverse but vibrant masochism. A Christmas Tree and a Wedding recounts the successful pursuit of a young girl by a lecherous old man. In Bobok, one Ivan Ivanovitch listens in on corpses gossiping in a cemetery and ends up deploring their depravity. In A Gentle Spirit, the narrator describes his dawning recognition that he is responsible for his wife’s suicide. In short, as a commentator on spiritual stagnation, Dostoevsky has no equal.
Short Stories from the Nineteenth Century is a wonderful collection of classic stories specially selected and introduced by David Stuart Davies. These are tales from the golden age of the great storytellers presenting evocative snapshots from that bygone era while at the same time providing engaging entertainment and stimulation for the modern reader.
Henry James was arguably the greatest practitioner of what has been called the psychological ghost story. His stories explore the region which lies between the supernatural or straightforwardly marvellous and the darker areas of the human psyche. This edition includes all ten of his ghost stories, and as such is the fullest collection currently available. The stories range widely in tone and type. They include 'The Jolly Corner', a compelling story of psychological doubling; 'Owen Wingrave', which is also a subtle parable of military tradition; 'The Friends of the Friends', a strange story of uncanny love; and 'The Private Life', which finds a shrewd, high comedy in its ghostly theme. The volume also includes James's great novella The Turn of the Screw, perhaps the most ambiguous and disturbing ghost story ever written.
Anna Sewell's Black Beauty was an immediate success on its publication in 1877, and has gone on to sell an estimated 50 million copies. Black Beauty is a horse with a fine black coat, a white foot and a silver star on his forehead. Seen through his eyes, the story tells of his idyllic upbringing and the hardship and cruelty he suffers subsequently, before finding security and happiness in a new home. Black Beauty is one of the most popular children's books ever written.
In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a huge cyclone transports the orphan Dorothy and her little dog Toto from Kansas to the Land of Oz, and she fears that she will never see Aunt Em and Uncle Henry ever again. But she meets the Munchkins, and they tell her to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City where the Wonderful Wizard of Oz will grant any wish. On the way, she meets the brainless Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion. The four friends set off to seek their heart's desires, and in a series of actionpacked adventures they encounter a deadly poppy field, fierce animals, flying monkeys, a wicked witch, a good witch, and the Mighty Oz himself.
In Glinda of Oz, the last of the original ‘Oz’ books, Dorothy and Princess Ozma seek the help of Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, when they find themselves in peril on the Magic Isle of the Skeezers
More’s Utopia is a complex, innovative and penetrating contribution to political thought, culminating in the famous ’description’ of the Utopians, who live according to the principles of natural law, but are receptive to
Christian teachings, who hold all possessions in common, and view gold as worthless. Drawing on the ideas of Plato, St Augustine and Aristotle, Utopia was to prove seminal in its turn, giving rise to the genres of utopian and dystopian prose fiction whose practitioners include Sir Francis Bacon, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. At once a critique of the social consequences of greed and a meditation on the personal cost of entering public service, Utopia dramatises the difficulty of balancing the competing claims of idealism and pragmatism, and continues to invite its readers to become participants in a compelling debate concerning the best state of a commonwealth.
With an Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull.
Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer.
Although subtitled A Novel without a Hero, Vanity Fair follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives: through the retiring Amelia Sedley and the brilliant Becky Sharp, Thackeray examines the position of women in an intensely exploitative male world.
When Vanity Fair was published in 1848, Charlotte Brontë commented: ‘The more I read Thackeray’s works the more certain I am that he stands alone – alone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling… Thackeray is a Titan.’
"War and Peace" is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy's philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery.
This translation is one which received Tolstoy's approval.
Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine's brother Hindley and wrongly believing that his love for Catherine is not reciprocated, leaves Wuthering Heights, only to return years later as a wealthy and polished man. He proceeds to exact a terrible revenge for his former miseries.
The action of the story is chaotic and unremittingly violent, but the accomplished handling of a complex structure, the evocative descriptions of the lonely moorland setting and the poetic grandeur of vision combine to make this unique novel a masterpiece of English literature.
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The Waves
Virginia Woolf
Introduction and Notes by Deborah Parsons, University of Birmingham.
'I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot', Virginia Woolf stated of her eighth novel, The Waves. Widely regarded as one of her greatest and most original works, it conveys the rhythms of life in synchrony with the cycle of nature and the passage of time. Six children - Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis - meet in a garden close to the sea, their voices sounding over the constant echo of the waves that roll back and forth from the shore.
The subsequent continuity of these six main characters, as they develop from childhood to maturity and follow different passions and ambitions, is interspersed with interludes from the timeless and unifying chorus of nature. In pure stream-of-consciousness style, Woolf presents a cross-section of multiple yet parallel lives, each marked by the disintegrating force of a mutual tragedy.
The Waves is her searching exploration of individual and collective identity, and the observations and emotions of life, from the simplicity and surging optimism of youth to the vacancy and despair of middle-age.
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