The Puritans thought Hester Prynne's crime was unforgiveable. She was convicted, imprisoned -- and then forced to wear, forever, a public reminder of her sin. The Scarlet Letter. The Letter was unending punishment: it set Hester apart from society, it tormented her days and haunted her soul. But the Letter haunted others, as well. Its mystery turned Roger Chillingworth from a gentle healer into a man driven by revenge. Its meaning burned into Rev....

Eliza Harris, a slave whose child is to be sold, escapes her beloved home on the Shelby plantation in Kentucky and heads North, eludes the hired slave catchers and is aided by the underground railroad. Another slave, Uncle Tom, is sent "down the river" for sale and ultimately endures a martyr's death under the whips of Simon Legree's overseers.

The sensational bestselling story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters-the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness";...

"On board a ship bound for Natal, adventurer Allan Quatermain meets Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good. His new friends have set out to find Sir Henry's younger brother, who vanished while seeking King Solomon's legendary diamond mines in the African interior. By strange chance, Quatermain has a map to the mines, drawn in blood, and agrees to join the others on their perilous journey. The travellers face many dangers on their quest - the baking...

English literature's first and greatest superhero, Sherlock Holmes still fascinates readers more than 100 years after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the beloved detective. In this, the first collection of Holmes's stories, the detective uses his uncanny skills to rescue a king from blackmail, to capture an ingenious bank robber, and to save an innocent son accused of patricide. Though readers have good reason to believe Holmes will somehow triumph...

The spoiled son of an American millionaire is washed overboard off Newfoundland and is picked up by a fishing boat. The boy experiences a great change in his perspective when he is forced to share the life and labour of the crew.

Dr. Manette is released from the Bastille after eighteen years' confinement, which has driven him to the edge of madness. He is "recalled to life" by the joyous reconciliation with his daughter Lucie, and returns with her to England. But Manette's maniacal obsession with shoemaking, developed during his long incarceration, is not quite over, for there are dark secrets surrounding his "crime" that have yet to emerge; secrets involving the reprehensible...

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,...

Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain of his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War, and also a travel book, recounting his trip along the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans many years after the War. The book begins with a brief history of the river as reported by Europeans and Americans, beginning with the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in 1542. It continues with anecdotes of Twain's...

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.