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Penguin publishes forty-five of the nation’s top 100 favourite titles. If you haven’t read them yet, then now’s your chance to enjoy some of the nation’s favourite reads in our special 3-for-2 offer. Choose any three titles from The Big Read promotion and get the cheapest one FREE. Please note: Your shopping basket will show the list price of each item with a subtotal and your discount will be applied at the checkout. ‘How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn’t you tell me there was danger? Why didn’t you warn me?’ When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D’Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her ‘cousin’ Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future. With its sensitive depiction of the wronged Tess and powerful criticism of social convention, Tess of the D’Urbervilles is one of the most moving and poetic of Hardy’s novels. Based on the three-volume first edition that shocked readers when first published in 1891, this edition includes as appendices: Hardy’s Prefaces, the Landscapes of Tess, episodes originally censored from the Graphic periodical version and a selection of the Graphic illustrations.
This exploration of gender and property ownership in eight important novels argues that property is a decisive undercurrent in narrative structures and modes, as well as an important gender signature in society and culture. Tim Dolin suggests that the formal development of nineteenth-century domestic fiction can only be understood in the context of changes in the theory and laws of property: indeed femininity and its representation cannot be considered separately from property relations and their reform. He presents original readings of novels in which a woman owns, acquires or loses property, focusing on exchanges between patriarchal cultural authority, the 'woman question' and narrative form, and on the place of domestic fiction in a culture in which property relations and gender relations are subject to radical review. Each chapter revolves around a representative text, but refers substantially to other material, both other novels and contemporary social, legal, political and feminist commentary.
This exploration of gender and property ownership in eight important novels argues that property is a decisive undercurrent in narrative structures and modes, as well as an important gender signature in society and culture. Tim Dolin suggests that the formal development of nineteenth-century domestic fiction can only be understood in the context of changes in the theory and laws of property: indeed femininity and its representation cannot be considered separately from property relations and their reform. He presents original readings of novels in which a woman owns, acquires or loses property, focusing on exchanges between patriarchal cultural authority, the 'woman question' and narrative form, and on the place of domestic fiction in a culture in which property relations and gender relations are subject to radical review. Each chapter revolves around a representative text, but refers substantially to other material, both other novels and contemporary social, legal, political and feminist commentary.
Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her 'cousin' Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future. With its sensitive depiction of the wronged Tess and powerful criticism of social convention, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is one of the most moving and poetic of Hardy's novels.
Under the Greenwood Tree is Thomas Hardy’s one and only rural idyll, a startling contrast to his other Wessex tales. In Mellstock, its surrounding farms and woodlands, the story interweaves the lingering courtship of Dick Dewy and sweet Fancy Day with the battle for survival of the old Mellstock String Choir – the last in the county – against the mechanical church organ of the new vicar, the Reverend Maybold. Under the Greenwood Tree appears to be pastoral romance at its most sunlit and good humoured, and has been called the ‘most nearly flawless of Hardy’s novels’. Yet, as Tim Dolin shows in his Introduction, there is a darker side to this paradise, seen particularly in the conflicts arising over anachronistic customs and rituals, and the ambiguities surrounding Fancy’s forthcoming marriage. For Hardy, who drew out the associations with his own childhood in later revisions, the novel came to epitomize a past that had been forever lost to him and to England. This new Penguin Classics edition, based on the two-volume first edition of 1872, includes Appendices which reflect the unique textual history of the novel. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Tim Dolin
'I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre.' George Eliot Lucy Snowe, in flight from an unhappy past, leaves England and finds work as a teacher in Madame Beck's school in 'Villette'. Strongly drawn to the fiery autocratic schoolmaster Monsieur Paul Emanuel, Lucy is compelled by Madame Beck's jealous interference to assert her right to love and be loved. Based in part on Charlotte Bronte's experience in Brussels ten years earlier, Villette (1853) is a cogent and dramatic exploration of a woman's response to the challenge of a constricting social environment. Its deployment of imagery comparable in power to that of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and its use of comedy-ironic or exuberant-in the service of an ultimately sombre vision, make Villette especially appealing to the modern reader. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth (1853) was the first mainstream novel to
make a fallen woman its eponymous heroine. It is a remarkable story
of love, of the sanctuary and tyranny of the family, and of the
consequences of lies and deception, one that lays bare Victorian
hypocrisy and sexual double-standards. Shocking to contemporary
readers, its radical utopian vision of "a pure woman faithfully
presented" predates Hardy's Tess by nearly forty years. This fully
revised and corrected new edition is based on the three-volume
first edition of 1853, collated with the one-volume 1855 edition.
Tim Dolin's fascinating new introduction challenges the view of
Ruth as one of Gaskell's weaker novels and explores its radicalism
and cultural influence, highlighting the remarkable story of love,
family, and hypocrisy that it tells. In addition, the book includes
an up-to-date bibliography, a chronology of Gaskell's life and
work, and invaluable notes that shed much light on the book's
historical, religious, and literary allusions and points of
significance.
Elfride Swancourt is the daughter of the Rector of Endelstow, a
remote sea-swept parish in Corwall based on St Juliot, where Hardy
began A Pair of Blue Eyes during the beginning of his courtship of
his first wife, Emma. Blue-eyed and high-spirited, Elfride has
little experience of the world beyond, and becomes entangled with
two men: the boyish architect, Stephen Smith, and the older
literary man, Henry Knight. The former friends become rivals, and
Elfride faces an agonizing choice.
This tale of an opportunistic yet ultimately loyal adventuress, who begins life humbly and ends as the wife of a rakish aristocrat, will surprise readers of Hardy’s more familiar, and darker, Wessex novels.
Thomas Hardy's life spanned the rise and decline of industrial Britain, the age of capital and the First World War. A Victorian and a modern both, his influence has been great. Dolin's biography draws connections between private and public concerns and reveals a Hardy engaged with politics and culture as well as his rural Wessex.
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