Albeit that she is not yet 21, Emma Woodhouse foresees a future as a spinster dabbling in matchmaking. Charming and infuriating, she almost ruins the marriage prospects of Harriet Smith, her protégée, after misguidedly attempting to match Harriet with the local rector, who is in fact in search of a wealthy wife. Reprimanded by her friend, George Knightly, and misled by Frank Crawford, whom she s
Rodion Raskolnikov is a radical, impoverished former student, who decides to see if he can commit the perfect crime and sets out to murder an unscrupulous pawnbroker and ends up murdering her sister as well. Filled with remorse (at which he is somewhat surprised), Raskolnikov is also plagued by the appearance of the detective looking to solve the crime, Porfiry, as well as the visit to St Peters
One of the most popular characters of Victorian fiction, Sherlock Holmes returns here to take on his arch-enemy, Moriarty, in a collection of stories first published in The Strand Magazine between 1903 and 1904. This volume contains 13 classic detective stories featuring the iconic detective.
ABOUT THE SERIES: Arcturus Essential Sherlock Holmes presents Arthur Conan Doyle's best-loved Holmes s
Once upon a time the brothers Grimm published a scholarly collection of folk tales, but only when they rewrote them for children did the Fairy Tales become popular. In addition to accusations of violence that led to more sanitized versions of the Tales than this 1884 translation
Hard Times is set in Victorian England in the 1850s and the fictitious industrial city of Coketown, where Thomas Gradgrind, 'A man of realities', is obsessed with a misguided utilitarianism that insists on 'nothing but fact', without emotion or imagination.
'I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious instead of shameful. And this
novel is the furthest I've gone. To me it is beautiful and tender as the naked self.' - D.H. Lawrence
Lady Chatterley's Lover explores the intense affair between the sexually frustrated Connie - whose husband, Clifford, is paralysed from the waist down - and Oliver Mellors, the family
A shipwreck brings Lemuel Gulliver to Lilliput, where he finds himself in a kingdom of tiny people. This experience is later reversed when he lands among the giants of Brobdingnag. And yet more contrasts lie in store for him between the Houyhnhnms - a race of noble horses - and the savage sub-human Yahoos.
Gulliver's Travels has not been out of print since its publication in 1726. Readers, 'fr
Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy''s Wessex novels. It tells the story of the young farmer Gabriel Oak and his love for and pursuit of the elusive Bathsheba Everdene, whose wayward nature leads her to both tragedy and true love.
'It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known' is perhaps one of literature's most famous lines. Spoken by the dissolute barrister Sydney Carton as he goes to his death at the guillotine, it sees the end of a passionate story that moves between two great European capitals, London and Paris, before and during the F
Published in 1826, The Last of the Mohicans is an adventure story centred on the kinship between white frontiersman, Natty Bumppo - or 'Hawkeye' - and two Mohican Indians, Chingachgook and his son Uncas. The action takes place during the French and Indian War. Alice and Cora, daughters of a British fort commander, are on a perilous journey through the dark forests of western New York. Their Huron
First published in serial form in Le Gaulois, Gaston Leroux's bitter-sweet tale of love and rejection was inspired by real events that took place at the Paris Opera, now the Opera Garnier, in the 19th century. It tells the tale of the opera singer, Christine, her love for her childhood sweetheart Raoul, and the obsessions of the 'phantom', a disfigured man called Erik who lives beneath the Opera
Gibran's masterpiece has furnished individuals the world over with words of joy or consolation on occasions of birth, marriage, death and all of life's other milestones. The concise and deeply profound discourses cover a whole range of topics on life and the human condition, including love, children, work, delight and sorrow, reason and passion, self-knowledge, freedom, pleasure and beauty.
Sta
Reading A Christmas Carol has become for many a tradition during the festive season. The character of Ebenezer Scrooge has become the epitome of miserliness, but A Christmas Carol is a story of redemption as Scrooge is visited in turn by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future.
ABOUT THE SERIES: The Arcturus Classics series brings together high-quality paperback editions of classics wo
Jim was first mate on the Patna, when the ship and passengers were abandoned by the crew in the Red Sea. Accused of cowardice, Jim immerses himself in work on a remote colonial trading post yet, despite the locals†high regard for him, the guilt of the Patna remains.