Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Appears on list
Description
"A Connecticut engineer named Hank Morgan gets knocked on the head and is transported back in time to medieval England during King Arthur's reign. He is initially captured but uses his Yankee ingenuity to eventually become boss of the realm. The book recounts his adventures and use of his "modern" technology against the royalty, knights, and church of the day. He continually makes fun of the backwards nature of the citizens and contrasts it to his...
Author
Series
Description
Meet the charming and cunning Becky Sharp, insinuating upward through the social ranks with the fervor of Napoleon plowing through Europe, and the subtlety of a butterfly. More so than any other picaresque character, Becky Sharp's name has become synonymous with a gold-digging, amoral, opportunistic social charmer who is also shrewd and strong-a portrait of a complex woman of her time. She is the anti-heroine you love to hate, and yet at the same...
3) Jane Eyre
Author
Description
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,...
Author
Series
Description
Virginia Woolf said of Emily Brontë that her writing could : "make the wind blow and the thunder roar," and so it does in Wuthering Heights. Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, and the windswept moors that are the setting of their mythic love are as immediately stirring to the reader of today as they have been for every generation of readers since the novel was first published in 1847. With an introduction by Katherine Frank.
5) Middlemarch
Author
Series
Description
"A novel 'with a double plot interest. The heroine, Dorothea Brooke, longs to devote herself to some great cause and, for a time, expects to find it in her marriage to Rev. Mr. Casaubon, an aging scholar. Mr. Casaubon lives only eighteen months after their marriage, a sufficient period to disillusion her completely. He leaves her his estate, with the ill-intentioned proviso that she will forfeit if she marries his young cousin Will Ladislaw, whom...
Author
Series
Description
Of all Jane Austen's books, Pride and Prejudice has earned a special place in the hearts of the reading public as her best-loved and most intimately known novel. From its famous opening sentence the story of the Bennet family and of the novel's two protagonists, Elizabeth and Darcy, told with a wit that its author feared might prove 'rather too light and bright, and sparkling', delights its most familiar readers as thoroughly as it does those who...
7) Villette
Author
Series
Description
With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor, Paul Emmanuel. Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully...
Author
Series
Description
"The mysterious new tenant of Wildfell Hall has a dark secret. But as the captivated Gilbert Markham will discover, it is not the story circulating among local gossips. Living under an assumed name, 'Helen Graham' is the estranged wife of a dissolute rake, desperate to protect her son from his destructive influence. Her diary entries reveal the shocking world of debauchery and cruelty from which she has fled. Combining a sensational story of a man's...