Though Silas Maner started life as a religious man, a heartbreaking betrayal leaves him feeling abandoned by his friends, the woman he is to marry, and his God. He leaves everything behind and exiles himself to the small village of Raveloe. The suspicious and superstitious townspeople of Raveloe don't understand the reclusive weaver and soon come to the conclusion that Marner is too strange and perhaps even a bit evil. Marner's growing stack of gold...

Anthony Trollope was well aware that the seemingly parochial power struggles that determine the action of Barchester Towers -- struggles whose comic possibilities he exploits to hilarious effect -- actually went to the heart of mid-Victorian English society, and had, in other times and other guises, led to civil war and constitutional upheaval. This awareness heightens the comedy and intensifies the drama in this magnificent novel and it transforms...

Jane Eyre (originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography) is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published on 16 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London, England, under the pen name "Currer Bell." The first American edition was released the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York. Primarily of the bildungsroman genre, Jane Eyre follows the emotions and experiences of its title character, including her growth to adulthood,...

When young Fanny Price comes to live with her aunt and uncle Bertram at Mansfield Park, it is because of the outcast state of her own parents. Her dreadful aunt and three cousins become her enemies, making her life miserable and causing Fanny to grow up quiet and shy. When the arrival of the Crawfords upsets the Bertram household, the young people become involved in dangerous plots to marry to better their station. Fanny has fallen in love with her...

Austen tells the story of Catherine Morland and her dangerously sweet nature, innocence, and sometime self-delusion. Though Austen's fallible heroine is repeatedly drawn into scrapes while vacationing at Bath and during her subsequent visit to Northanger Abbey, Catherine eventually triumphs, blossoming into a discerning woman who learns truths about love, life, and the heady power of literature.

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...

It is the story of Sterne's fictional travel through both countries, particularly France. Sterne made two trips within the continent, in 1762-64 and 1765-66, but the book is not about his errands, but those of parson Yorick's (a character in "Tristram Shandy"). With a less acid and outrageous humor than in his previous work, Sterne anyway mixes the picaresque with an ironic and, frequently, hilarious philosophical irony. Yorick begins by trying to...

"Barnes & Noble Classics "pulls together a constellation of influences--biographical, historical, and literary--to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works. Left penniless by the death of his improvident father, young Nicholas Nickleby assumes responsibility for his mother and sister and seeks help from his Scrooge-like Uncle Ralph. Instantly disliking Nicholas, Ralph sends him to teach in a school run by the stupidly sadistic Wackford...

The celebrated Victorian author of Middlemarch explores the turbulent world of Florence during the Italian Renaissance in this sweeping historical novel. Florence, 1492. Lorenzo de Medici has just died, leaving governance of the Florentine Republic to his son Piero, an unskilled ruler. Meanwhile, Tito Melema, a shipwrecked stranger, finds love with a young woman named Romola, the devoted daughter of a blind scholar. Though her brother has a vision...