An exploration of how seven of the greatest English novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries portray the essential experiences of life. For Mendelson--a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University--these classic novels tell life stories that are valuable to readers who are thinking about the course of their own lives. Looking beyond theories to the individual intentions of the authors and taking into consideration...

"This collection of essays examines the work of Victorian authors Wilkie Collins, M.E. Braddon, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Wollstonecraft, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and Charlotte Bronte. Each essay explores their use of archetypal Gothic elements to depict nineteenth-century attitudes to class, gender, race, colonialism and imperialism"--Provided by publisher.