1920, a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from the Muslim Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is alive with spirits.

While Mrs Hattingh eagerly awaits her son’s visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf.

So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs. Hattingh writes – a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.

For almost 150 years, the writings of Branwell Bronte, the tragically self-destructive brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, have remained largely inaccessible, scattered in incomplete manuscript form across the world's libraries and private collections. This is the first publication of two of the longest of Branwell's surviving manuscripts, The Life of...Northangerland and Real Life in Verdopolis. A prolific writer, Branwell's work took the form of chronicles detailing the activities of his central character, Alexander Percy, revolutionary leader and ruthless statesman. These two Angrian Chronicles, newly transcribed, reconstructed, and annotated under the editorship of Robert G. Collins, reveal the dramatic world of the Brontes' Angria, not from the more sentimentalized viewpoint of Charlotte, but focusing instead on the lawless and brutal society of Branwell's robber-king, statesman and self-proclaimed Lucifer. The stories suggest a detailed psychological description of Branwell's own tragic life, and indicate a significant influence on the work of his more celebrated sisters. Read for its own narrative interest, its biographical relevance, and for the many ways in which it reflects significant aspects of the novels his sisters later wrote, The Hand of the Arch-Sinner reveals an astonishing and neglected talent in the fourth Bronte."

George Eliot's first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, appeared serially in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1857. It was immediately recognized as, in the words of the Saturday Review, "the production of a peculiar and remarkable writer whose style showed little or no family resemblances with that of any living author." Using the first edition of 1858 as copy text, this edition records all substantive variants in the manuscript and subsequent editions of the book over which the author had control. The editor's introduction gives a detailed history of the writing and publication of the work, as well as a description of the manuscript and lists of emandations and variant spellings.

An indispensable and provocative compilation of witty essays dealing with Biblical stories and their inconsistencies from America's master satirist, Mark Twain.
"The Bible According to Mark Twain" is a selection of essays spanning forty years of his writing career, which touch on and satirize stories and figures from the Bible. In his characteristic style, Twain illustrates the inherent comedy and inconsistencies found within Holy Scripture, simultaneously entertaining and provoking questions about man's place in the world and his relationship with God. An important installment in the Twain canon, this book is perfect for fans of America's master satirist.

Anne Bronte's novel "Agnes Grey", was first published in 1847. This edition incorporates the author's unpublished manuscript revisions to the first edition, together with a textual history and explanatory notes.;Anne Bronte drew heavily on her own experiences as a governess and the novel reflects her sense of the isolation and social ambivalence of the governess's position. Her strongly held religious views are also much in evidence.;Hilda Marsden is also co-editor, with Ian Jack, of "Wuthering Heights" in the same series.

‘I'm a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl that was not?

Travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman, presents her fellow-countryman Winterbourne with a dilemma he cannot resolve.  Is she deliberately flouting social convention in the outspoken way she talks and acts, or is she simply ignorant of those conventions? When she strikes up an intimate friendship with an urbane young Italian, her flat refusal to observe the codes of respectable behaviour leave her perilously exposed. In Daisy Miller James created his first great portrait of the enigmatic and dangerously independent American woman, a figure who would come to dominate his later masterpieces.

This edition has a fascinating introduction by Geoffrey Moore in which he explores the themes of innocence and experience in the novel, and notes by Patricia Crick.

Praise for the Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot "It is the best available edition....The Clarendon format...establishes the history of the text with impeccable research."--Journal of English and Germanic Philology. "Clarendon editions of nineteenth-century novels are almost invariably without parallel."--Nineteenth-Century Literature Often considered George Eliot's finest novel, Middlemarch is a masterpiece of literary realism. This is the first edition of the novel to be published with full critical apparatus since it appeared in 1871-2. It records all the variants in the main edition as well as many of the deletions in the manuscript. The introduction traces the history of composition, publication, and revision.

Poets of all times, places and sensibilities have been moved to write about war. They have commemorated the Battles of Thermopylae, Agincourt and Shilph, and London in an air raid. They have announced the Charge of the Light Brigade; witnessed Break of Day in the Trenches; handed down through oral tradition, the Blackfoot Indian Song for a Fallen Warrior; sent a Newsreel from Vietnam. From Horace and Virgl to Steveie Smith, from the anonymous bards of ancient China to Adam Mickiewicz and Primo Levi, these poets have encompassed the entire spectrum of feeling - pride, compassion, courage anger fear excitement, anguish, even laughter. Here. in this anthology, are more than one hundred of their most memorable poems.

Henry James called The Blithedale Romance "the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest" of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels."

Written in one of the most productive periods of Hawthorne's career, The Blithedale Romance was published a year after The House of the Seven Gables and two years after his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter. With The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne writes fully in his own time, not haunting his characters with the American past. Drawn from his stay at Brook Farm, a communal experiment in living the pastoral life, this engaging story touches on many of the issues of Hawthorne's day, from brotherhood to women's rights and socialism to mesmerism and spiritualism.

Published in 1852, The Blithedale Romance remains a captivating work about politics, love, the supernatural, and idealism, written with Hawthorne's sharp wit and deep intelligence.

A man who has lived in the world, marking how every act, although in itself perhaps light and insignificant, may become the source of consequences that spread far and wide, and flow for years or centuries, could scarcely feel secure in reckoning that with the death of the Duke of Strelsau and the restoration of King Rudolf to liberty and his throne, there would end, for good and all, the troubles born of Black Michael's daring conspiracy. The stakes had been high, the struggle keen; the edge of passion had been sharpened, and the seeds of enmity sown. Yet Michael, having struck for the crown, had paid for the blow with his life: should there not then be an end? Michael was dead, the Princess her cousin's wife, the story in safe keeping, and Mr. Rassendyll's face seen no more in Ruritania. Should there not then be an end? So said I to my friend the Constable of Zenda, as we talked by the bedside of Marshal Strakencz. The old man, already nearing the death that soon after robbed us of his aid and counsel, bowed his head in assent: in the aged and ailing the love of peace breeds hope of it. But Colonel Sapt tugged at his gray moustache, and twisted his black cigar in his mouth, saying, "You're very sanguine, friend Fritz. But is Rupert of Hentzau dead? I had not heard it." ...]

This title is part of an inexpensive range of classics in the Penguin Popular Classics series.

This selection of more than forty poems from a reading figure of the Harlem Renaissance includes both uncompromising indictments of racial injustice and celebrations of the triumphs of African-Americans.

From setting foot in Asia in 1849 (or was it 1845?) as Anna Crawford (or was it Anna Edwards?) to waltzing with Yul Brynner in glorious technicolor, Anna Leonowens and her romanticized experiences as the only Westerner behind the walls of Nang Harm (the walled harem of the king of Siam) have had a long, colourful, and often controversial existence.

The story of a philandering, dishonest Boston journalist and the woman who divorces him, this is the first serious treatment of divorce in American writing and a powerful example of realism in literature.

In the picaresque tradition of Baccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Laurence Sterne, Jacques the Fatalist is an 18th-century French novel relating the adventures of a servant and his master as they journey through France on horseback. Around the central thread of Jacques' humorous narration of his romantic affairs, the author of the Encyclopedia and Rameau's Nephew fashions a signal work of innovative fiction that slyly investigates philosophical and literary questions such as art, time, reality, freedom, and the definition of the novel itself.

What happens on this journey? Jacques tells his master his adventures; this story in turn is contantly interrupted by other stories or by Diderot, as narrator, who comes in to tease the reader about the future course of the novel. Diderot is eager to be agreeable, so long as the reader realized that the fabricator of a novel can as easily proceed in this way as in that. The book foreshadows a number of 19th and 20th century literary techniques, exchanging the rational and classical for shifting perspectives of time, personality, and viewpoint.

In J. Robert Loy's smooth and accurate translation (the first in English except for a privately printed one of 1798), the reader can now discover the originality of Diderot's witty masterpiece. It is a book that no one interested in the evolution of modern fiction, or the ideas of the Enlightenment, will want to miss.

The Portable Stephen Crane allows us to appreciate the full scope and power of this writer's vision. It contains three complete novels—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George's Mother, and Crane's masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage; nineteen short stories and sketches, including "The Blue Hotel" and "The Open Boat", a barely fictionalized account of his own escape from shipwreck while covering the Cuban revolt against Spain; the previously unpublished essay "Above All Things"; letters and poems, plus a critical essay and notes by the noted Crane scholar Joseph Katz.