In Jane Austen's third published novel after Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice? young Fanny Price is sent to live with her wealthy uncle and aunt? Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram? at Mansfield Park. Raised among her four cousins? Fanny, the poor relation, often goes unobserved in the household? making her a unique observer of the ethics? morals? attitudes and behavior of English society.

The Moonstone is one of the most famous suspense novels of all time: a masterpiece of construction and the ultimate page-turner, it introduced one of the world's most beloved genres, the detective story. At a party celebrating her eighteenth birthday, Rachel Verinder wears the stunning yellow diamond she unexpectedly inherited from her uncle, Colonel John Herncastle. She is not aware that the precious gem, known as the Moonstone, has been missing...

We meet young free-spirited Rachel Vinrace aboard her father's ship, the Euphrosyne, departing London for South America. Surrounded by a clutch of genteel companions -- among them her aunt Helen, who judges Rachel to be "vacillating, " "emotional, " and "more than normally incompetent for her years" -- Rachel displays a startling maturity when she finds her engagement to the writer Terence Hewet listing toward disaster.

"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." Blind, broken by the death of his wife and bitterly disappointed by the Restoration, Milton dictated his sweeping biblical epic Paradise Lost to a series of helpers. While the struggle between God and Satan rages across the cosmos, the human tragedy of Adam and Eve the temptation and fall is movingly depicted in language unsurpassed in its musicality and beauty. A staggering and audacious undertaking...

A deliciously satirical attack on a money-mad society, Vanity Fair, which first appeared in 1847, is an immensely moral novel, and an immensely witty one. Vanity Fair features two heroines: the faithful, loyal Amelia Sedley, and the beautiful and scheming social climber Becky Sharp. It also engages a huge cast of wonderful supporting characters as the novel spins from Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies to affairs of love and war on the Continent...

Combining detailed physical description with perceptive psychological insight, Leo Tolstoy realistically sweeps aside the sham of surface appearances to lay bare man's intimates gestures, acts, and thoughts.

This dramatic autobiography of the early life of an American slave was first published in 1845, when its young author had just achieved his freedom. Douglass' eloquence gives a clear indication of the powerful principles that led him to become the first great African-American leader in the United States. The personal account of a fugitive slave's privation and sufferings and his campaigns for Negro emancipation. This dramatic autobiography of the...