English Literature

First published in 1797, The Italian , with its archetypal villain Schedoni, its intense romance between Vincenzo di Vivaldi and Elena di Rosalba and lofty poetics of the sublime, is the masterpiece of Gothic fiction. Enlisted by Vincenzo's mother...
By: Ann Radcliffe

Never published in its author’s lifetime and intended solely for his own children, to whom he read it every Christmas, The Life of Our Lord is an accessible and gently humorous take on the life of Jesus Christ and his teachings. Far removed from the...
By: Charles Dickens

A new selection of Llewelyn Powys’s essays, A Struggle for Life attempts to illustrate both the evolution of the author’s thought and writing and the incredible breadth and variety of his interests. At once personal and universal, the twenty-eight...
By: Llewelyn Powys

Written in America while Trocchi was working on a scow on the Hudson River, Cain’s Book is an extraordinary autobiographical account about a junky’s life, and an honest, raunchy, eye-opening trip through hell. Probably the most famous novel about...
By: Alexander Trocchi

The daughter of well-to-do tradespeople in the fictional mining town of Woodhouse, Alvina Houghton struggles to find excitement in her provincial surroundings and worries that she is condemned to become an old maid. After plans to elope with her...
By: D.H. Lawrence

The most ambitious narrative of nineteenth-century realism, Middlemarch tells the story of an entire town in the years leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832, a time when modern methods were starting to challenge old orthodoxies. Eliot’s...
By: George Eliot

A glorious exercise in cheeky punmanship, The Wonderful Wonder of Wonders sees Jonathan Swift in fine form. Flying by the seat of his pants, the great author treats us to a condensed biography of his posterior, enlivened by some inspired wordplay....
By: Jonathan Swift

In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De Quincey’s innovative, idio­syncratic artistic vision found space for gruesome reportage, satire, literary criticism and aesthetic judgements, in a work strewn with examples ranging from...
By: Thomas de Quincey

Following an incident at sea, fifty-year-old Captain Eugène Marius finds himself without employment or purpose in Marseille, paying fruitless daily visits to the port’s shipping offices. Consumed by guilt, spurned by his family and faced with the...
By: James Hanley