English Literature

In Hard Times , Dickens illustrates the condition of England through his depiction of the fictional northern city of Coketown. Among its inhabitants are Thomas Gradgrind, the utilitarian headmaster who attempts to impose his rigid worldview on his...
By: Charles Dickens

Born into a poor family, Fanny Price is raised amid the daunting splendour of Mansfield Park by her rich uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram. Treated as an inferior by most of the family, Fanny forms a close attachment to her cousin Edmund, the only person to...
By: Jane Austen

While enjoying a six weeks’ stay in fashionable Bath, the young and callow Catherine Morland is introduced to the delights of high society. Thanks to a new literary diet of the sensational and the macabre, Catherine travels to Northanger Abbey fully...

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

The present selection traces the development of Yeats’s verse, encompassing the poet’s interest in Irish folklore and national identity, his engagement with the political situation of his day and the rich symbolism that is the hallmark of his work...
By: W.B. Yeats

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

The Good Soldier tells the stories of two outwardly happy couples who meet at a health spa in Germany just before the start of the First World War, and whose loveless, adultery-ridden relationships are strained and gradually disintegrate, with...
By: Ford Madox Ford

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

Four sailors discover a copper cylinder containing a manuscript written by the adventurer Adam More, who was shipwrecked in the southern hemisphere. They read its contents out to one another, and the incredible story unfolds of his journey through a...
By: James de Mille