The magical Peter Pan comes to the night nursery of the Darling children, Wendy, John and Michael. He teaches them to fly, then takes them through the sky to Never-Never Land, where they find Red Indians, wolves, Mermaids and... Pirates. The leader of the pirates is the sinister Captain Hook. His hand was bitten off by a crocodile, who, as Captain Hook explains 'liked me arm so much that he has followed me ever since, licking his lips for the rest of me'. After lots of adventures, the story reaches its exciting climax as Peter, Wendy and the children do battle with Captain Hook and his band.
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is the magical tale that first introduces Peter Pan, the little boy who never grows any older. He escapes his human form and flies to Kensington Gardens, where all his happy memories are, and meets the fairies, the thrushes, and Old Caw the crow. The fairies think he is too human to be allowed to stay in after Lock-out time, so he flies off to an island which divides the Gardens from the more grown-up Hyde Park - Peter's adventures, and how he eventually meets Mamie and the goat, are delightfully illustrated by Arthur Rackham.
‘… the shadow turned round; and I saw a terrible death’s-head, which darted a look at me from a pair of scorching eyes. I felt as if I were face to face with Satan…’
Erik, the Phantom of the Paris Opera House, is one of the great icons of horror literature. This tormented and disfigured creature has made his home in the labyrinthine cellars of this opulent building where he can indulge in his great passion for music, which is a substitute for the love and emotion denied him because of his ghastly appearance.
It is in the Opera House that he encounters Christine Daaé whom he trains in secret to become a great singer. Erik’s passionate obsession with a beautiful woman beyond his reach is doomed and leads to the dramatic tragic finale.
Gaston Leroux’s novel is a marvellous blend of detective story, romance and spine-tingling terror which has fascinated readers ever since the work was first published.
Wilde's only novel, first published in 1890, is a brilliantly designed puzzle, intended to tease conventional minds with its exploration of the myriad interrelationships between art, life, and consequence. From its provocative Preface, challenging the reader to believe in 'art for art's sake', to its sensational conclusion, the story self-consciously experiments with the notion of sin as an element of design.
Yet Wilde himself underestimated the consequences of his experiment, and its capacity to outrage the Victorian establishment. Its words returned to haunt him in his court appearances in 1895, and he later recalled the 'note of doom' which runs like 'a purple thread' through its carefully crafted prose.
When Pollyanna Whittier goes to live with her sour-tempered aunt after her father’s death, things seem bad enough, but then a dreadful accident ensues.
However, Pollyanna’s sunny nature and good humour prove to have an astonishing effect on all around her, and this wonderful tale of how cheerfulness can conquer adversity has remained one of the world’s most popular children’s books since its first publication in 1913.
In Pollyanna Grows Up, the only sequel written by Porter herself, Pollyanna finds that that, despite being cured of her health problems, adulthood brings fresh challenges to be overcome.
Dickens had already achieved renown with The Pickwick Papers. With Oliver Twist his reputation was enhanced and strengthened. The novel contains many classic Dickensian themes - grinding poverty, desperation, fear, temptation and the eventual triumph of good in the face of great adversity.
Oliver Twist features some of the author's most enduring characters, such as Oliver himself (who dares to ask for more), the tyrannical Bumble, the diabolical Fagin, the menacing Bill Sikes, Nancy and 'the Artful Dodger'.
For any reader wishing to delve into the works of the great Victorian literary colossus, Oliver Twist is, without doubt, an essential title.
Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction between Catherine and the various characters whom she meets there, and tracks her growing understanding of the world about her.
In this, her first full-length novel, Austen also fixes her sharp, ironic gaze on other kinds of contemporary novel, especially the Gothic school made famous by Ann Radcliffe. Catherine's reading becomes intertwined with her social and romantic adventures, adding to the uncertainties and embarrassments she must undergo before finding happiness.
Castigated for offending against public decency, Madame Bovary has rarely failed to cause a storm. For Flaubert's contemporaries, the fascination came from the novelist's meticulous account of provincial matters. For the writer, subject matter was subordinate to his anguished quest for aesthetic perfection. For his twentieth-century successors the formal experiments that underpin Madame Bovary look forward to the innovations of contemporary fiction. Flaubert's protagonist in particular has never ceased to fascinate. Romantic heroine or middle-class neurotic, flawed wife and mother or passionate protester against the conventions of bourgeois society, simultaneously the subject of Flaubert's admiration and the butt of his irony - Emma Bovary remains one of the most enigmatic of fictional creations. Flaubert's meticulous approach to the craft of fiction, his portrayal of contemporary reality, his representation of an unforgettable cast of characters make Madame Bovary one of the major landmarks of modern fiction.
Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results.
The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her.
In the hope of saving her brother's life, should a woman submit to rape? Should the law be respected when its administrator is corrupt? How powerful in the state should religion become? Although Measure for Measure ends like a comedy, with reconciliations, forgiveness and marriages, it has often been regarded as one of Shakespeare's problem plays. The drama shows the difficulty of effecting an appropriate balance between judicial severity and mercy, between sexual repression and decadence, and between political vigilance and social manipulation. These problems remain topical, and, in Measure for Measure, they are given immediacy by vivid character-conflicts and memorably intense poetry. This is one of Shakespeare's most probing and powerful works.
Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.
Henry James described Middlemarch as a ‘treasurehouse of detail’ while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot’s masterpiece as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.
"Moby-Dick" is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic. But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab's appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each. Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel's narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education: in the practice of whaling, in the art of writing.
Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a break with the traditional novel form and reflects a genuine humanity and a concern with the experiences that both enrich and stultify existence.
Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party. Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers gradually reveal the characters of the central protagonists. Clarissa's life is touched by tragedy as the events in her day run parallel to those of Septimus Warren Smith, whose madness escalates as his life draws toward inevitable suicide.
The delicate artistry and lyrical prose of Woolf?s fourth novel have established her as a writer of profound talent.
"Jane Eyre" ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious, sardonic and attractive Mr Rochester. However, there is great kindness and warmth in this epic love story, which is set against the magnificent backdrop of the Yorkshire moors.
The Jungle Book introduces Mowgli, the human foundling adopted by a family of wolves. It tells of the enmity between him and the tiger Shere Khan, who killed Mowgli's parents, and of the friendship between the man-cub and Bagheera, the black panther, and Baloo, the sleepy brown bear, who instructs Mowgli in the Laws of the Jungle.
The Second Jungle Book contains some of the most thrilling of the Mowgli stories. It includes Red Dog, in which Mowgli forms an unlikely alliance with the python Kaa, How Fear Came and Letting in the Jungle as well as The Spring Running, which brings Mowgli to manhood and the realisation that he must leave Bagheera, Baloo and his other friends for the world of man.
With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley's Lover is the novel with which D.H. Lawrence is most often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a world-wide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated edition. The famous 'Lady Chatterley trial' heralded the sexual revolution of the coming decades and signalled the defeat of Establishment prudery.
Yet Lawrence himself was hardly a liberationist and the conservativism of many aspects of his novel would later lay it open to attacks from the political avant-garde and from feminists. The story of how the wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley responds when her husband returns from the war paralysed from the waist down, and of the tender love which then develops between her and her husband's gamekeeper, is a complex one open to a variety of conflicting interpretations.
This edition of the novel offers an occasion for a new generation of readers to discover what all the fuss was about; to appraise Lawrence's bitter indictment of modern industrial society, and to ask themselves what lessons there might be for the 21st century in his intense exploration of the complicated relations between love and sex.
One of the great classics of western literature, Les Misérables is a magisterial work which is rich in both character portrayal and meticulous historical description.
Characters such as the absurdly criminalised Valjean, the street urchin Gavroche, the rascal Thenardier, the implacable detective Javert, and the pitiful figure of the prostitute Fantine and her daughter Cosette, have entered the pantheon of literary dramatis personae.
The reader is also treated to the unforgettable descriptions of the Battle of Waterloo and Valjean’s flight through the Paris sewers.
Volume 1 of 2
One of the great classics of western literature, Les Misérables is a magisterial work which is rich in both character portrayal and meticulous historical description.
Characters such as the absurdly criminalised Valjean, the street urchin Gavroche, the rascal Thenardier, the implacable detective Javert, and the pitiful figure of the prostitute Fantine and her daughter Cosette, have entered the pantheon of literary dramatis personae.
The reader is also treated to the unforgettable descriptions of the Battle of Waterloo and Valjean?s flight through the Paris sewers.
Little Dorrit is a classic tale of imprisonment, both literal and metaphorical, while Dickens' working title for the novel, Nobody's Fault, highlights its concern with personal responsibility in private and public life. Dickens' childhood experiences inform the vivid scenes in Marshalsea debtor's prison, while his adult perceptions of governmental failures shape his satirical picture of the Circumlocution Office. The novel's range of characters - the honest, the crooked, the selfish and the self-denying - offers a portrait of society about whose values Dickens had profound doubts.
Little Dorrit is indisputably one of Dickens' finest works, written at the height of his powers. George Bernard Shaw called it ‘a masterpiece among masterpices’, a vedict shared by the novel's many admirers.
First published in 1900, Lord Jim established Conrad as one of the great storytellers of the twentieth century. Set in the Malay Archipelago, the novel not only provides a gripping account of maritime adventure and romance, but also an exotic tale of the East. Its themes also challenge the conventions of nineteenth-century adventure fiction, confirming Conrad's place in literature as one of the first 'modernists' of English letters.
Lord Jim explores the dilemmas of conscience, of moral isolation, of loyalty and betrayal confronting a sensitive individual whose romantic quest for an honourable ideal are tested to the limit. In this novel, Conrad draws on his background as Polish emigré, as well as his first-hand experience as a seaman, to experiment radically with the presentation of human frailty and doubt in the modern world.
Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel, The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the "roaring twenties", and a devastating expose of the ‘Jazz Age’.
Through the narration of Nick Carraway, the reader is taken into the superficially glittering world of the mansions which lined the Long Island shore in the 1920s, to encounter Nick's cousin Daisy, her brash but wealthy husband Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby and the mystery that surrounds him.
The Great Gatsby is an undisputed classic of American literature from the period following the First World War and is one of the great novels of the twentieth century.
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