Tolstoy’s romantic Anna, long-suffering Karenin, dashing Vronsky, and dozens of their family members, friends, and neighbors are among the most vivid characters in world literature. In the thought-provoking Introduction to this volume, Gary Saul Morson provides unusual insights into these characters, exploring what they reveal about Tolstoy’s radical conclusions on romantic love, intellectual dishonesty, the nature of happiness, the course of...

Jane Austen's first published novel, sparkling with wit and artistry, captures the inequities of birth, class, and marriage faced by the sisters Dashwood. Published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility has delighted generations of readers with its masterfully crafted portrait of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Forced to leave their home after their father's death, Elinor and Marianne must rely on making good marriages as their means of support....

Persuasion is the last novel fully completed by Jane Austen during her own life. It was published posthumously in 1818, one year after her death. It is a story concerning the courtship and marriage of a young woman, Anne Elliot, being raised by a widowed father while under the persuasive influence of an aristocratic friend and neighbor of the family. Austen completed the novel before commencing upon another new novel titled Sanditon of which she completed...

Northanger Abbey follows seventeen year old Gothic novel aficionado Catherine Morland and family friends Mr. and Mrs. Allen as they visit Bath, England. Catherine is in Bath for the first time, and is excited to spend her time visiting newly-made friends, such as Isabella Thorpe, and going to balls. Catherine finds herself pursued by Isabella’s brother, the rather rough-mannered dandy John Thorpe, and by her real love interest, Henry Tilney.

In this extraordinary collection of stories, New York Times bestselling author Maeve Binchy once again reveals her incomparable understanding of matters of the heart with powerfully compelling stories of love, loss, revelation, and reconciliation.
A secretary's silent passion for her boss meets the acid test on a business trip. . . .
A man and a woman's mutual disdain at first sight shows how deceptive appearances can...

In early nineteenth-century England, an orphaned young woman accepts employment as a governess and soon finds herself in love with her employer who has a terrible secret. Charlotte Bronte's novel about the passionate love between Jane Eyre, a young girl alone in the world, and the rich, brilliant, domineering Rochester has enthralled every kind of reader, from the most critical and cultivated to the youngest and most unabashedly romantic, ever since...

CLASSIC FICTION (PRE C 1945). Contains stories that show us truants, seducers, gossips, rally-drivers, generous hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, amateur theologians, struggling musicians, moony adolescents, victims of domestic brutishness, sentimental aunts and poets, patriots earnest or cynical, and people striving to get by. This book contains introduction and notes by Laurence Davies, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. Living overseas...

Seven-year-old Sara Crewe dreams of helping the poor and needy. But after her father's death, she is left penniless and is forced to work at the exclusive London boarding school where she was once a student.