Catalog Search Results
1) Agnes Grey
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Driven by poverty, a young girl seeks employment as a governess, but she finds her job far more difficult than she expected.
Author
Series
Description
This brilliant novel explores the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman's life. Direct and vivid in her account of the details of Clarissa Dalloway's preparations for a party she is to give that evening, Woolf ultimately managed to reveal much more. For it is the feeling behind these daily events that gives Mrs. Dalloway its texture and richness and makes it so memorable.
Author
Series
Appears on list
Description
"West Sussex. A mysterious man in a long-sleeved trench coat, gloves, and a wide-brimmed hat arrives at Mr. and Mrs. Hall's inn. His face is almost entirely concealed (much like most of his personality and identity), except for a fake pink nose. He keeps to himself, working in his rooms during the day, only leaving at night. Griffin's peculiar habits quickly make him the talk of the town. After his landlady demands he pay his rent, he reveals his...
4) Persuasion
Author
Series
Description
"Persuasion by Jane Austen. What does persuasion mean - a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most open to change. She lives at the time of the Napoleonic wars, a time of accident, adventure, the making of new fortunes and alliances. A woman of no importance, she maneuvers in her restricted circumstances as her long-time love...
Author
Description
Man can move easily enough in the three dimensions of space - why not the fourth: Time? An intriguing after-dinner conversation takes an unexpected turn when the host produces a small machine, which promptly disappears into thin air. It has been sent into the future, he says. Or maybe the past. As his skeptical guests try to fathom what they have seen, the host unveils a full-size machine, nearing completion. At a similar gathering one week later...
6) Bleak House
Author
Series
Description
With their estate entangled in an interminable legal case, the young wards of the court Richard Carstone and Ada Clare are taken into the benevolent care of the kindly John Jarndyce. Ada's companion, the gentle and good-hearted Esther Summerson, is devoted to the old man and, although she loves another, becomes betrothed to him. But behind Esther's supposed orphan past lies a dark secret that leads tragically to deceit, blackmail and murder. And as...
Author
Series
Description
Kidnapped from his California home and sold to prospectors embarked for the Yukon Gold Rush, Buck, a pampered house dog who has known comfort all of his life, finds himself thrust into a brutal world of cruel human masters, savage fellow sled-dogs, and an unforgiving wilderness full of hardship and misery. In the wilds, Buck earns the love of a man as rugged as he is, and he reacquaints himself with his true animal nature, a noble heritage passed...
Author
Series
Formats
Description
"The mysterious new tenant of Wildfell Hall has a dark secret. But as the captivated Gilbert Markham will discover, it is not the story circulating among local gossips. Living under an assumed name, 'Helen Graham' is the estranged wife of a dissolute rake, desperate to protect her son from his destructive influence. Her diary entries reveal the shocking world of debauchery and cruelty from which she has fled. Combining a sensational story of a man's...
Author
Series
Description
The adventures of a boy and a runaway slave as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft. Originally intended as a sequel to his immensely popular Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stands on its own as one of America's most important and beloved literary classics. For generations, young and old alike have delighted in the unforgettable adventures of runaways Huck Finn and Jim, a slave. In vivid, often gripping...
Author
Series
Formats
Description
John Harmon returns to England as his father's heir. Believed drowned under suspicious circumstances--a situation convenient to his wish for anonymity--John evaluates Bella Wilfer whom he must marry to secure his inheritance. The story is filled with colorful Victorian characters and incidents -- the faded aristocrats and parvenus gathered at the Veneering's dinner table, Betty Higden and her terror of the workhouse and the greedy plottings of Silas...
Author
Series
Description
The adventures and pranks of a mischievous boy growing up in a Mississippi River town on the early nineteenth century. Here is one of the great American novels, illustrated by one of this country's most distinguished artists. Readers will enjoy the antics of that irrepressible boy-hero, Tom, who lies to his Aunt Polly and still is forgiven, wins the heart of Becky Thatcher by getting whipped at school, gets out of whitewashing a fence by tricking...
12) Villette
Author
Series
Formats
Description
With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor, Paul Emmanuel. Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully...
Author
Series
Description
Dr. Manette is released from the Bastille after eighteen years' confinement, which has driven him to the edge of madness. He is "recalled to life" by the joyous reconciliation with his daughter Lucie, and returns with her to England. But Manette's maniacal obsession with shoemaking, developed during his long incarceration, is not quite over, for there are dark secrets surrounding his "crime" that have yet to emerge; secrets involving the reprehensible...
Author
Series
Description
Virginia Woolf said of Emily Brontë that her writing could : "make the wind blow and the thunder roar," and so it does in Wuthering Heights. Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, and the windswept moors that are the setting of their mythic love are as immediately stirring to the reader of today as they have been for every generation of readers since the novel was first published in 1847. With an introduction by Katherine Frank.
15) Anna Karenina
Author
Series
Description
Anna Karenina is the wife of a prominant Russian government official. She leads a correct but confining upper-middle-class existence. She seems content with her life as a proper companion to her dignified, unaffectionate husband and an adoring mother to her young son, until she meets Count Vronsky, a young officer of the guards. He pursues her and she falls madly in love with him. Her husband refuses to divorce her, so she gives up everything, including...
Author
Series
Description
"The first-person narrative relates the coming-of-age of Pip (Philip Pirrip). Reared in the marshes of Kent by his disagreeable sister and her sweet-natured husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery, the young Pip one day helps a convict to escape. Later he is sent to live with Miss Havisham, a woman driven half-mad years earlier by her lover's departure on their wedding day....When an anonymous benefactor makes it possible for Pip to go to London for an...
17) Jane Eyre
Author
Description
Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious,...
18) The professor
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Narrated from the viewpoint of an ambitious and self-made man. Rejecting his aristocratic inheritance, William Crimsworth goes to Brussels to find his fortune. He takes a job teaching at a boarding school for young ladies, where he begins a flirtation with Zoraïde Reuter, who, out of jealousy, attempts to frustrate his courtship of Frances Henri, an attractive young woman determined to make her way in the world.
19) Shirley
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Following the dramatic romance of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte intended Shirley to be a 'salutary' change. Set in Yorkshire during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, the novel articulates the social realities of economic hardship, the Luddite riots, dissatisfaction with the government and an inadequate Church. In the foreground of these concerns, a mill-owner, Robert Moore, in pursuit of financial security, ignores the suffering of his workers to such...
Author
Series
Appears on list
Description
"A Connecticut engineer named Hank Morgan gets knocked on the head and is transported back in time to medieval England during King Arthur's reign. He is initially captured but uses his Yankee ingenuity to eventually become boss of the realm. The book recounts his adventures and use of his "modern" technology against the royalty, knights, and church of the day. He continually makes fun of the backwards nature of the citizens and contrasts it to his...