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"The Mayor of Casterbridge" is an 1886 novel by the legendary English writer Thomas Hardy. One of Hardy's "Wessex" novel (a fictional region of Britain that Hardy invented), the book is generally acknowledged as one of the author's masterpieces.
The story, set in the town of Casterbridge, concerns a married young farmer named Michael Henchard who, one drunken night, auctions off his wife Susan and baby daughter Elizabeth-Jane to a passing sailor,...
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The first in a series of books about the Pepper family, these imaginative children's stories have delighted readers since their original publication in 1881. This first novel introduces Ben, Polly, Joel, Davie, and Phronsie, the children of their widowed Mamsie, Mrs. Pepper. While very poor, the Peppers live in a supportive little town in their beloved Little Brown House. The family faces many challenges, such as sickness and an overflowing generosity...
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Henry James's tragicomic masterpiece pits a headstrong Mississippi lawyer against his feminist cousin in a no-holds-barred fight for the heart of an impressionable young suffragette. When Basil Ransom, a headstrong Mississippi lawyer, comes to Boston to call on his wealthy activist cousin, Olive, an epic battle of wills ensues. Basil is a conservative of the most ardent type while Cousin Olive is steadfast in her radicalism. Perhaps for a laugh, perhaps...
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Eight Cousins (1875) is a novel by American author, feminist, and abolitionist Louisa May Alcott. Based on her experience of being raised by a father dedicated to education reform, and grounded in her radical beliefs on the role of women in society, Eight Cousins is a masterpiece of children's literature that explores themes of family, death, and perseverance.
Rose Campbell is a young girl when her parents pass away. Orphaned, she is taken to the...
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Thomas Hardy's "The Woodlanders" was first published serially in 1887. The tale takes place in the woodland village of Little Hintock and is centers around the romantic dramas of its inhabitants. The story begins with Giles Winterborne, an honest woodsman, who wishes to marry his childhood sweetheart, Grace Melbury. While the two have been informally betrothed to each other since they were young, Grace gains an education through her father's persistent...
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The Mill on the Floss is a novel by George Eliot (the pen name of author Mary Ann Evans), published in 1860. The novel was originally published in three parts. It was very successful and was adapted into a film as early as 1937. It was Eliot's second novel and one of her most successful of all time. The novel tells the story of Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom as they grow from children to young adults in the small rural town of St. Ogg's, England....
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In "Two on a Tower," a love story set against the background of the stellar universe, Hardy defied social norms of the day and shocked his readers. In what is today seen as the author's most important portrayal of love across physical and societal divides, the novel tells the story of Lady Constantine, a married, older, aristocratic, religious woman who falls in love with Swithin St. Cleeve, a young astronomer, single, lower class, and agnostic. Hardy's...
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"The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today" is the collaborative work of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirized the era of political greed and corruption that followed the American Civil War. This period is often referred to as "The Gilded Age" because of this book. The corruption and greed that was typical of the era is exemplified through two fictional narratives; one of the Hawkins family, a poor family from Tennessee who try to get the government...
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Jude the Obscure, the semi-autobiographical final novel from Thomas Hardy explores notions of surprising candor; within the eponymous protagonist lies the tragic truth of failed ambitions and relationships. In a fierce exploration of the darkness of love and the intellect, this is one of the great tragic novels of English literature.
Jude Fawley, an earnest boy from a rural English village, dreams of a life of academia despite his working-class background....
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Construction engineer Bartley Alexander is a troubled, middle-aged man torn between Winifred, his American wife - a cold woman with clearly defined standards - and Hilda Burgoyne - an alluring mistress in London who has helped him recapture his youth and sense of freedom. Alexander's relationship with Hilda gnaws away at his sense of propriety and honor and eventually proves disastrous. (He is with Hilda when a messenger, unable to find him, fails...
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This daring tale of revenge and exotic intrigue is demonstrative of Stevenson's broad range and unique genius. "The Master of Ballantrae", first published in 1889, follows the conflict between two Scottish brothers of noble origins during the tumultuous Jacobite Risings of 1745. Greed and envy threaten to tear the brothers apart as a race for the family inheritance intensifies. James Durie, the protagonist and Master of Ballantrae, is as charming...
12) Dombey and Son
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English
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Charles Dickens was an English short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and the most popular novelist to come out of the Victorian era. Many of his novels, with their frequent concern for social reform, were first published in magazines in serial form under the pseudonym, Boz. Unlike authors who completed entire novels before serialization, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialized. The continuing popularity of his novels and...
13) The Golden Bowl
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English
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The Golden Bowl comes in the first years of the 20th-century: the publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, decided never to serialise it and published it in New York in December 1904 in two volumes. After just a few months, in February 1905, also Methuen published the novel in London in a one-volume edition.
In 1909, a revised edition appeared as volumes 23 and 24 of the New York edition, and James this time also prepared the preface, in which he reflected...
14) Fathers and Sons
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First published in 1862, Ivan Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" is widely considered to be the author's greatest literary achievement. It is a novel about the clash of ideologies of two generations. The older generation, the fathers, represents an upper class whose power and influence is fading and giving way to the younger generation, the sons, who represent an increasing objection to the status quo. This conflict is embodied in the characters of Arkady...
15) Almayer's Folly
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Almayer, an immigrant living on the Malayan continent with his native wife and his daughter, Nina, dreams of riches, and so pursues hidden gold mines and begins construction on a mansion to impress the British forces that he believes are coming to conquer the region. However, none of Almayer's schemes come through for him, and his recklessness results in a desperate situation for him and his family.
Almayer's Folly was Joseph Conrad's first novel....
16) Rainbow Valley
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Anne of Green Gables volume 7
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English
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When widower, John Meredith and his four children move to a new town, they quickly bond with Jem, Walter, Nan, Di, Shirley and Rilla Blythe. Despite their questionable reputation, they become close friends spending time at a place called, Rainbow Valley.
Anne and Gilbert Blythe are happily married with six children. Similar to their parents, Jem, Walter, Nan, Di, Shirley and Rilla are bright, kind and extremely perceptive. They soon meet a new...
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"The greatest writer of his time."-Edmund Wilson
"One of the great poets of the novel, a genius of his art"-Edgar Johnson
"His characters are marvelous, his insights wonderful…you don't expect reality but you get something bigger and better."-Ruth Rendell
The Old Curiosity Shop was initially published in a weekly serial, "Master Humphrey's Clock", between 1840 and 1841. Charles Dickens' story of the frail and innocent orphan had become such...
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A young woman, Cytherea Graye, is forced by poverty to accept a post as lady's maid to the eccentric Miss Aldclyffe, the woman whom her father had loved but had been unable to marry. Cytherea loves a young architect, Edward Springrove, but Miss Adclyffe's machinations, the discovery that Edward is already engaged to a woman whom he does not love, and the urgent need to support a sick brother drive Cytherea to accept the hand of Aeneas Manston, Miss...
19) Jo's Boys
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Little Women series volume 4
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English
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Jo's Boys (1886) is a novel by American author Louis May Alcott. Written while Alcott was living in the historic Thoreau-Alcott House in Concord, Massachusetts, Jo's Boys picks up ten years after the events of Little Men, which followed the young sons of Jo Bhaer (née March) and Professor Friedrich Bhaer at their newly established Plumfield Estate School. As with the rest of the series, Jo's Boys was inspired by the educational reforms theorized...
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First published in 1903, "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" is the charming and classic children's novel beloved the world over. Written by the American author and educator Kate Douglas Wiggin, it is the story of young and poor Rebecca Rowena Randall, who goes to live with her spinster aunts in the town of Riverboro when she is ten years-old. Rebecca's father had died three years before and the family farm had become heavily indebted. In order to ease the...
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