In 1811, Jane Austen's first published work, Sense and Sensibility," " marked the debut of England's premier novelist of manners. Believing that "3 or 4 families in a country village is the very thing to work on," she created a brilliant tragicomedy of flirtation and folly. Romantic walks through lush Devonshire and genteel dinner parties at a stately manor draw two pretty sisters into the schemes and manipulations of landed gentry determined to marry...

The story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters-the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness"; the mannish lawyer...

A classic of the sea, telling of the pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who defied capture. October 18th, 2001, marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of the greatest novel in American literature. The Modern Library trade paperback edition exclusively features the timeless illustrations of Rockwell Kent, an Introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick, commentary by Herman Melville and William T. Porter, contemporary reviews from John Bull and The...

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained...

This story is set mainly in Ireland, although much of the novel takes place at Scroope Manor in Dorsetshire, the ancestral home of the ageing Earl of Scroope.

A lawyer in Victorian London tries to understand the nature of the strange relationship between his physician friend and the cruel and violent man he seems to protect. Illustrated sidebar notes provide historical background to the text.

When young Richard Gale arrives in the Arizona border town of Casita, he finds himself surrounded by Mexican and American troops, bandits and renegades--and makes an enemy of Rojas, a vicious Mexican bandit leader.

While Hank Morgan, Twain's time-displaced Yankee traveller, keeps up a steady stream of flippancies, founding the first tabloid, the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano, and organizing a game of baseball between armour-clad knights, he also keeps up a steady commentary on the social mores of King Arthur's court, criticizing the hereditary social classes and state church still strong in the Victorian England of Twain's own day, and championing...