Charlotte Brontë’s wild and intense imagination created in Jane Eyre one of the enduring romances of English fiction.

Orphaned into the cold charity of her Aunt Reed’s household at Gateshead, resisting the privations of Lowood school, Jane Eyre emerges alone in the world with little but her own passionate spirit and sense of divine will to guide her. When she takes up a post as governess in the gloomy grandeur of Thornfield Hall, she meets Rochester. Charlotte Brontë’s Byronic hero is a married man who loves Jane, and would do anything in his power to win her.

‘I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours’ Charlotte Brontë reputedly said to her sisters Emily and Anne. In Jane Eyre she portrays the irrational, transforming force of love with a style that is magical, idiosyncratic and inspired.

The Woodlanders > Selling @ RM 7

Passion and money, beauty and ambition, these are the opening themes in The Woodlanders, a novel revolving around a small village community coming to terms with a radically changing world.

Plain Marty South, a young country girl mature beyond her years, endures her love for Giles Winterborne in silence. He works in partnership with George Melbury, the local timber-merchant and chief man of business in the area.

Giles has deep unspoken feelings for Mr Melbury’s daughter Grace who has been away at boarding school and now returns to Little Hintock an educated young woman with modern ideas. Giles belongs to a past she no longer wants to be a part of and she is soon attracted to the new handsome young doctor in the village, Edred Fitzpiers. As they all follow their lonely course, their lives become………….

Karen Ling

‘There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood teh figure of a soliatry Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments’

Walter Hartright’s contemplations on the lonely, moonlit road are rudely broken by the nameless and distress woman in white. The encounter is to change his life, for she is at the centre of villainous machinations which are profoundly to affect him – and those he loves.

Through carefully constructed characterizations, intricate plotting and masterly skill in concealing and revealing secrets. Wilkie Collins has created one of the greatest mystery thrillers in the English language.

Vanity Fair > Now Selling @ RM 5

A richly comic dissection of English society during the Napoleonic Wars.

Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley together leave the shelter of Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for Young Ladies. They now inhabit the infinitely more fascinating and dangerous Vanity Fair where the only standard is worldly sucess. Becky, charming and amoral, is well-fitterd for the fight; when an ill-judged bowl of punch ruins her plan for marriage, her quick wits soon find a range of alternatives. But sweet and sentimental Amelia only longs for her worthless soldier lover.

There are battles, military and domestic, fortunes made and lost, elopements and betrayals. The corrupt, the grotesque and the downright wicked all struggle to make their way amongst the tawdry glamour of the Regency. And through the narrative strolls the relaxed figure of the author, pointing out a moral here and there as he shines a light into society’s murkier corners.

I’ve read many times but I still don’t understand the story at all. I even watched the movie but still it doesn’t help a bit.

Wuthering Heights > Now Selling @ RM 5

‘If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be…’

The haunting intensity of Catherine Earnshaw’s attachment to Heathcliff is the focus of a novel in which relations between men and women are described with an emotional and imaginative power unparalleled in English fiction.

First published in 1847, Wuthering Heights is set on the bleak Yorkshire moors, where the drama of Catherine and Heathcliff, Heathcliff’s cruel revenge against Edgar and Isabella Linton, and the promise of redemption through the next generation is enacted.

The Portrait of A Lady > Now Selling @ RM 5

Isabel Archer has been brought to England from Albany, New York, by her Aunt Touchett to extend ther education, possibly to marry well.

Isabel, proud and independent, has other ideas. She has no desire to marry and wishes to create her own future, rather than finding it as a wife. Consequently she refuses two very eligible suitors: Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodwood, who has followed her to Europe from America.

When her uncle Lord Touchett dies, leaving Isabel a fortune, he unwittingly does her a great disservice, for on a visit to Italy she is introduced by Madame Merle to Gilbert Osmond. Osmond is a charming but worthless dilettante who sees Isabel as a beautiful prize, a mother for hsi daughter Pansy, and a source of easily attained wealth. From his cruel cynicism comes Isabel’s tragic disillusionment…………..

The Moonstone > Now Selling @ RM 5

The Moonstone, a priceless Indian diamond which had come to England as spoils of war, is given to Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday. that very night, the stone is stolen; suspicion falls on a hunchbacked housemaid, on Rachel’s cousin Franklin Blake, on a troupe of mysterious Indian jugglers, and on Rachel herself.

The phlegmatic Sergeant Cuff is called in, and with the help of Betteredge, the Robinson Crusoe-reading loquacious Steward, the mystery of the missing stone is ingeniously solved.

Age of Innocence > Now Selling @ RM 5

The reutrn of the beautiful Countess Olenska into the rigidly conventional society of New York sends reverberations throughout the upper reaches of society.

Newland Archer, an eligible young man of the establishment, is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a pretty ingenue, when May’s cousin, Countes Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence.

Her sorrowful eyes, her tragic worldliness and her air of unapproachability attract the sensitive Newland. Almost against their will, a passionate bond develops between them. But Archer’s life has no place for passion, and, with society on the side of May and all she stands for, he finds himself drawn into a bitter conflict between love and duty.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles > Now Selling @ RM 5

‘Hardy watches over Tess like a stricken victim. He is as tender to Tess as Tess is to the world. Tender and helpless’ – Irving Howe

Into his story of a simple but beautiful country girl’s seduction by another man which causes her husband to leave her on their wedding night and thereby preciptates a course of events that ends in murder. Hardy wove a luminous tenderness and longing. ‘I have never been able to put on paper all that she is, or was to me,’ he said.

In defying convention and making a milkmaid the subject of tragedy, Hardy gave rein to this feeling for landscape and rural life – its harshness, seasonal rhythms and reminders of death and resurrection – and endows them with a brooding symbolism and visionary beauty.

Sons and Lovers > Now Selling @ RM 5

Drawing on his own childhood and adolescence, Lawrence depicts the early married life of the Morels – the father a hardworking, hard-drinking Nottinghamshire coal miner, the mother a refined woman of middle-class aspirations. Born into the family battle, their son Paul Morel initially takes his mother’s part, until in adolescence he meets and falls in love with a young girl, Miriam, and discovers a new conflict of loyalties.

Sons and Lovers portrays the sexual and emotional struggle of Paul Morel, caught between the women he attempts to love, and in it D.H. Lawrence transforms autobiography into art.

Sense and Sensibility > Now Selling @ RM 5

‘I am never too busy to think of S & S. I can no more forget it than a mother can forget her sucking child.’

So wrote Jane Austen to her sister in April 1811, while the sheets of the first edition were coming off the press. Disappointed in her first attempt to publish a novel, Jane Austen had turned to a work which she had started many years earlier, ‘Elinor and Marianne’. This story, renamed Sense and Sensibility, was the first of her novels to be published.

While the story centres on the personalities of the two sisters, whose contrasting temperaments are examined as they undergo comparable experiences in the loss of they men they love, it rejoices also ina wealth of minor characterss such as the comic Mrs Jennings and Sir John and Lady Middleton, drawn with consummate satiric skill.

Selected Tales > Now Selling @ RM 5

The undisputed master of terror and mystery, Edgar Allan Poe was a unique inventor in fiction.

In ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘The Black Cat’ he wrote the first and best tales of terror; with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and his fictional detective M. Dupin he invented the detective story; and tales such as ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ and ‘Von Kempelen and His Discovery’ pioneered modern science-fiction.

As readers will discover, Poe possessed an unrivalled capacity to create atmosphere and suspense, and to probe the dark depths of the human psyche. All the stories in this volume push back the boundaries, making the improbable possible, the familiar terrifying and strange.

Plain Tales from the Hills > Now Selling @ RM 5

‘And India, as every one knows, is divided equally between jungle, tigers, cobras, cholera, and sepoys’

In this collection of short stories Kipling succeeds in shattering such miapprehensions about life in India during the British Raj. Drawing on his own experiences as a cub reporter, he is able to interpret the ways and beliefs as well as the work and pleasures of the Imperial administrators and the races they governed that were half a world away from his original Victorian readers.

Viceroys and beggars, soldiers and their officers, civil servants and children – and some very clever women – all play their parts in the history of a sub-continent. And although everywhere there are barriers between the races, the classes and the sexes, the inevitable misunderstandings between them as often end in comedy as in tragedy.

Much Ado About Nothing > Now Selling @ RM 5

A new, modern-spelling text, collated and edited from all existing printings.

On-page commentary and notes explain meaning, staging, allusions, and much else.

Detailed introduction considers composition, sources, performances, and changing critical attitudes to the play.

Illustrated with production photographs and related art.

Full index to introduction and commentary.

Durable sewn binding for lasting use.

Like the play very much. First known about this story from an English Lecturer in college; 1 of our lessons.

Miserables > Now Selling @ RM 5

Few novels ever swept the world with such overpowering impact as Les Miserables. Within twenty-four hours of its publication in 1862, the first Paris edition was sold out. In other great cities throughout the world, it was devoured with equal relish.

Sensational , dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, Les Miserables is not only a superb adventure but a powerful social document. The story of how the convict Jean Valjean struggles to escape his past and reaffirm his humanity in a wolrd brutalized by poverty and ignorance became the gospel of the poor and the oppressed. One of the greatest works in Western literature. Les Miserables is an exhilarating and deeply profound reading experience.

Emma > Now Selling @ RM 5

‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.’

Emma (1816) is Jane Austen’s most characteristic work. Written with irony, wit, and faultless control, it is both a novel of intense emotional power and a comic masterpiece.

Convinced that she understands the world, Emma rules over her invalid father and the small social circle of Highbury with well-meaning tyranny. But she is highly fallible where love is concerned, and her failings there cause many misunderstandings – as well as giving the reader much enjoyment as order is restored.

Christmas Books > Now Selling @ RM 5

Each of these five short stories was written specifically for Christmas, and they are infused with tremendous vitality as Dickens combines his concern for social ills with the myths and memories of childhood and traditional Christmas spirit-lore. The very words ‘Merry Christmas’ were first coined in A Christmas Carol, the first of these books, which has become a touchstone of English Christmas fiction, and an enduring favourite the world over.

Some of the stories I had to read a few times; only then I understand.

Bleak House > Now Selling @ RM 5

Dickens’s most wide-ranging and symbolic novel, Bleak House is set in the world of Chancery and focuses in particular on the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

The case, which was originally brought to settle a dispute over a will, has been running at court for generations and has used up a great deal of health and wealth in its course. Richard Carstone and Ada Clare have been made wards of court and live with John Jarndyce at Bleak House while they await the verdict. During that time they marry, always expecting their fortunes to improve…

Also living at Bleak House is Esther Summerson, a young woman of unknown origins. Tulkinghorn, the cunning lawyer of Sir Leicester Dedlock, has his suspiciouns as to her true parentage, however, and only death can stop him from making them known.

With its humour and pathos, its brilliant satire and its Jepiction of the Victorian……….

Readershack

L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, first published in 1908, is popular across the world.

It started as a short serial but has grown well beyond the initial idea into a series known as the Avonlea books.

A school teacher and a Presbyterian minister’s wife, L.M. Montgomery drew on her own girlhood experiences and memories on Prince Edward Island, and the story of Anned Shirley, the little red-haired orphan girl, adopted by Marilla Cuthbert and her brother has warmed the hearts of generations of children.

A Pair of Blue Eyes > Now Selling @ RM 5

‘Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface’

The opening lines of A Pair of Blue Eyese instantly portray their fair possessor as vain and superficial, deficiencies which lead her to vacillation in love and ‘proneness to inconstancy’. Elfride’s life has been a sheltered one, spent alone with her father – a parson with high social pretensions – until she meets and falls in love with an inexperienced youth, whose inferior birth prevents their marriage. This tender first love is overshadowed when Elfride is thrown into the company of the fascinating, though sexually immature, Henry Knights. United by a perilous adventure at a crucial moment, elfride conceals her previous affection and a web of deceit follows as hse tries to fulfil Knight’s pure ideal. Yet her moral cowardice must inevitably lead to tragedy…

Set in Hardy’s Wesses, his haunting third novel introduces the themes of idealism, virtue and female constancy, to be developed in such later works as Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Woodlanders and Far From the Madding Crowd.

A Christmas Carol > Now Selling @ RM 5

Charles Dickens, probably the best known and most popular English novelist born at Portsmouth in 1812. He suffered many hardships as a child and this probably resulted in him becoming an extremely hard worker for all his life. He published many novels dealing with the wrongs inflicted on children by adults in the 19th century.

A Christmas Carol was a sensational success when it was first published and he followed it in consecutive years with other Christmas books including Cricket on the Hearth, also contained within this volume.