Arrogant, self-willed and egotistical, Emma is Jane Austen’s most unusual heroine. Her interfering ways and inveterate matchmaking are at once shocking and comic. She is...

One of Katherine Mansfield’s finest short stories, Bliss, introduces us to Bertha, who experiences a sense of rapture as she reflects on her life. On her walk home one day, she...

Jane Austen’s most popular novel, originally published in 1813, some 17 years after it was first written, presents the Bennet family of Longbourn. Against the background of...

‘Santa Montefiore is a born storyteller’ 

Young, wealthy Arabella is obsessed with French romances: brought up by a reclusive widowed father in an isolated castle, she has educated herself through their pages, and been...

A charming, practical, and unsentimental approach to putting a home in order while reflecting on the tiny joys that make up a long life.In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering...

‘What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists? In real life, how many men and women fall in love?’ So says Rhoda Nunn, George Gissing’s formidable heroine. Through a...

The Portrait of a Lady tells the compelling and ultimately tragic tale of a beautiful young American woman's encounter with European sophistication. Set principally in England and...

Heathcliff was to serve as the name for the ragged, dark-skinned orphan whom Mr. Earnshaw found abandoned in the streets of Liverpool and took home to live with his own children,...

When Catherine Morland, a country clergyman’s daughter, is invited to spend a season in Bath with the fashionable high society, little does she imagine the delights and perils...