Wordsworth

Nicholas Nickleby

Charles Dickens, 1995

Following the success of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby was hailed as a comic triumph and firmly established Dickens as a 'literary gentleman'. It has a full supporting cast of delectable characters that range from the iniquitous Wackford Squeers and his family, to the delightful Mrs Nickleby, taking in the eccentric Crummles and his travelling players, the Mantalinis, the Kenwigs and many more. Combining these with typically Dickensian elements of burlesque and farce, the novel is eminently suited to dramatic adaptation. So great was the impact as it left Dickens' pen that many pirated versions appeared in print before the original was even finished. Often neglected by critics, Nicholas Nickleby has never ceased to delight readers and is widely regarded as one of the greatest comic masterpieces of nineteenth-centure literature. Подробнее

Njal's Saga

Anon, 2008

Njal's Saga is the finest of the Icelandic sagas, and one of the world's greatest prose works. Written c.1280, about events a couple of centuries earlier, it is divided into three parts: the first recounts the touching friendship between noble Gunnar and the statesman Njal, together with the fatal enmity between their wives. The second part works out the central tragedy of the saga, while the third describes the retribution wrought by Flosi and Kari. The saga is remarkable not only for the details of everyday life — the farming, the feasting and the charcoal-burning — but also for the social structure of the society in which that life took place — the Althing or Parliament, the lawmaking and the lawgiving. The grandeur of the narrative and the beauty and distinction of the characters mark Njal's Saga as an essential text for all who love adventure and great literature. Подробнее

North and South

Elizabeth Gaskell, 1993

Set in the mid-19th century, and written from the author's first-hand experience, North and South follows the story of the heroine's movement from the tranquil but moribund ways of southern England to the vital but turbulent north. Elizabeth Gaskell's skilful narrative uses an unusual love story to show how personal and public lives were woven together in a newly industrial society. This is a tale of hard-won triumphs — of rational thought over prejudice and of humane care over blind deference to the market. Readers in the twenty-first century will find themselves absorbed as this Victorian novel traces the origins of problems and possibilities which are still challenging a hundred and fifty years later: the complex relationships, public and private, between men and women of different classes. Подробнее

Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen, 1992

Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction between Catherine and the various characters whom she meets there, and tracks her growing understanding of the world about her. In this, her first full-length novel, Austen also fixes her sharp, ironic gaze on other kinds of contemporary novel, especially the Gothic school made famous by Ann Radcliffe. Catherine's reading becomes intertwined with her social and romantic adventures, adding to the uncertainties and embarrassments she must undergo before finding happiness. Подробнее

Not Exactly Ghosts/Fires Burn Blue

Sir Andrew Caldecott, 2007

Here together for the first time in one volume are the twenty five spooky stories created by Sir Andrew Caldecott in two collections the 1940s: Not Exactly Ghosts and Fires Burn Blue. Caldecott, who only turned to fiction after retiring from the civil service, allowed his lifelong fascination with the supernatural full reign in these simple yet remarkably disturbing stories. Taking his inspiration from the master of the ghost story, M. R. James, who chilled by implication rather than by gory description, Caldecott created believable but unsettling scenarios which effectively produce a sense of unease in the reader. The mundane becomes horrific; the everyday is unnerving; and the commonplace is frightening. At last these rare forgotten gems are available once more to stir the imagination and chill the blood. Подробнее

The Odyssey

Homer, 1992

Homer's great epic describes the many adventures of Odysseus, Greek warrior, as he strives over many years to return to his home island of Ithaca after the Trojan War. His colourful adventures, his endurance, his love for his wife and son have the same power to move and inspire readers today as they did in Archaic Greece, 2800 years ago. This poem has been translated many times over the years, but Chapman's sinewy, gorgeous rendering (1616) stands in a class of its own. Chapman believed himself inspired by the spirit of Homer himself, and matches the breadth and power of the original with a complex and stunning idiom of his own. John Keats expressed his admiration for the resulting work in the famous sonnet, 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer': 'Much have I travelled in the realms of gold...' Подробнее

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens, 2000

Dickens had already achieved renown with The Pickwick Papers. With Oliver Twist his reputation was enhanced and strengthened. The novel contains many classic Dickensian themes — grinding poverty, desperation, fear, temptation and the eventual triumph of good in the face of great adversity. Oliver Twist features some of the author's most enduring characters, such as Oliver himself (Who dares to ask for more), the tyrannical Bumble, the diabolical Fagin, the menacing Bill Sykes, Nancy and 'the Artful Dodger'. Подробнее

Oriental Ghost Stories

Lafcadio Hearn, 2007

Lafcadio Hearn’s fascinating and unsettling ghost stories are a reinterpretation of oriental legends, and folktales. They are a potent blend of weird beauty and horror. Hearn, who referred to his narratives as ‘stories and studies of strange things’, believed that the spectral world was part of the oriental landscape. Lakes, mountains, ruined castles and terraced fields were the natural locale of ghostly spirits, and their intervention in human affairs was part of the natural order of things. Hearn’s apparitions are not a violent intrusion upon everyday reality; they are already a part of that reality, co-existing with the living. This collection contains the best of the work of this neglected master of the supernatural tale. Prepare to be charmed and chilled in equal measure. Подробнее

The Origin of Species

Charles Darwin, 1998

'A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die...'. Darwin's theory of natural selection issued a profound challenge to orthodox thought and belief: no being or species has been specifically created; all are locked into a pitiless struggle for existence, with extinction looming for those not fitted for the task. Yet 'The Origin of the Species' (1859) is also a humane and inspirational vision of ecological interrelatedness, revealing the complex mutual interdependencies between animal and plant life, climate and physical environment, and — by implication — within the human world. Written for the general reader, in a style which combines the rigour of science with the subtlety of literature, 'The Origin of the Species' remains one of the founding documents of the modern age. Подробнее

Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories (Original Illustrated «Strand» Edition)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1996

It is more than a century since the ascetic, gaunt and enigmatic detective, Sherlock Holmes, made his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet. From 1891, beginning with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the now legendary and pioneering Strand Magazine began serialising Arthur Conan Doyle's matchless tales of detection, featuring the incomparable sleuth patiently assisted by his doggedly loyal and lovably pedantic friend and companion, Dr Watson. The stories are illustrated by the remarkable Sydney Paget from whom our images of Sherlock Holmes and his world derive and who first equipped Holmes with his famous deerstalker hat. The literary cult of Sherlock Holmes shows no sign of fading with time as each new generation comes to love and revere the penetrating mind and ruthless logic which were the undoing of so many Victorian master criminals. Подробнее

Orlando

Virginia Woolf, 1995

Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Costantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women. Подробнее

Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions

Frank Harris, 2007

Written in 1910 and first privately published in New York in 1916, Frank Harris' «Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions» gained almost instant notoriety. Attacked by critics for its extravagant inventions, vigorously defended by George Bernard Shaw and hauled into court for libel by Wilde's friend and lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, Harris' biography was published in England only in 1938. Famously inaccurate and lavishly self-serving, Harris' study none the less offers a highly evocative portrait of a compelling personality — or rather of two personalities, for Harris never shies from enlarging upon his roles as Wilde's defender, adviser, and sometime friend. Impressionistic, vivid and well-paced, Harris' intimate account of Wilde's rise and fall will fascinate anyone with an interest in a dramatist and poet whose tempestuous, and ultimately tragic, life was his true major work. A serious contender, as one commentator put it, if there were an Olympic gold for lying, Harris provides as near as one gets in biography to a 'page-turner'. Подробнее

Othello

William Shakespeare, 1992

This is an intense drama of love, deception, jealousy and destruction. Desdemona’s love for Othello, the Moor, transcends racial prejudice; but the envious Iago conspires to devastate their lives. In its vivid rendering of racism, sexism, contested identities, and the savagery lurking within civilisation, Othello is arguably the most topical and accessible tragedy from Shakespeare’s major phase as a dramatist. Подробнее

A Pair of Blue Eyes

Thomas Hardy, 1995

A Pair of Blue Eyes is celebrated for its central scene which shocked and stimulated Victorian readers. Forever after it caused Hardy to be embroiled in arguments concerning the sexual morality of his novels in which he strove to show the stifling effects of social conventions on the human spirit. Rich with biographical echoes, this novel reveals the full emergence of the schematic ironies which characterize Hardy's later great works, and gives a suggestion of the tragic philosophy that came to dominate all he wrote. The loving nature of the heroine, Elfride Swancourt, pervades this novel, which has a singular unpolished charm. Подробнее

The Peninsular War

Roger Parkinson, 2000

The Peninsular War was a war of contrasts; a war fought in the icy passes of the high Pyrenees and on the burning wastes of the Sierra Morena; a war of infinite cruelty yet remarkable courtesy; a war in which debonair British officers fought alongside ragged Spanish partisans. It began in 1808 with Napoleon at the height of his power and ended with his attempted suicide in 1814. This narrative recaptures the horror, excitement and drudgery of history's first guerilla war. Подробнее

Peter Pan

J.M. Barrie, 1993

The magical Peter Pan comes to the night nursery of the Darling children, Wendy, John and Michael. He teaches them to fly, then takes them through the sky to Never-Never Land, where they find Red Indians, wolves, Mermaids and... Pirates. The leader of the pirates is the sinister Captain Hook. His hand was bitten off by a crocodile, who, as Captain Hook explains 'liked me arm so much that he has followed me ever since, licking his lips for the rest of me'. After lots of adventures, the story reaches its exciting climax as Peter, Wendy and the children do battle with Captain Hook and his band. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is the magical tale that first introduces Peter Pan, the little boy who never grows any older. He escapes his human form and flies to Kensington Gardens, where all his happy memories are, and meets the fairies, the thrushes, and Old caw the crow. The fairies think he is too human to be allowed to stay in after Lock-out time, so he flies off to an island which divides the Gardens from the more grown-up Hyde Park… Peter’s adventures, and how he eventually meets Mamie and the goat, are delightfully illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Подробнее

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde, 1992

Wilde's only novel, first published in 1890, is a brilliantly designed puzzle, intended to tease conventional minds with its exploration of the myriad interrelationships between art, life, and consequence. From its provocative Preface, challenging the reader to believe in 'art for art's sake', to its sensational conclusion, the story self-consciously experiments with the notion of sin as an element of design. Yet Wilde himself underestimated the consequences of his experiment, and its capacity to outrage the Victorian establishment. Its words returned to haunt him in his court appearances in 1895, and he later recalled the 'note of doom' which runs like 'a purple thread' through its carefully crafted prose. Подробнее

The Plays

Christopher Marlowe, 2000

The plays collected in this text provide the reader with a clear picture of Marlowe as a radical theatrical poet of great linguistic and dramatic daring, whose characters constantly strive to break out of the social, religious, and rhetorical binds within which they are confined. Подробнее

Plays

Anton Chekhov, 2007

Anton Chekhov’s popularity in the west is without parallel for a foreign writer. He has been absorbed into our culture, and accepted as one of our own. His plays lend themselves easily to the stage, calling for actors with intelligence and common sense rather than a dramatic voice or histrionic skills. He takes from everyday life themes of frustration which apply to us all – the difficulty of carving out a happy existence, the problems of love, the fading of hope, the universal feeling that time passes and we never quite get things right. This seems pessimistic, and yet Chekhov claimed he was writing comedy. Readers, actors and directors must decide for themselves which way to play these pieces. They are full of sadness, but a sadness described as the ‘darkness of the last hour before the dawn’. Whether tragic or comic, however, they are works of the first importance. The Cherry Orchard has been described as ‘the best play since Shakespeare’, Three Sisters as ‘the best play in the world’. Подробнее

The Plumed Serpent

D.H. Lawrence, 1995

In this novel, symptomatic of Lawrence's later work, Kate Leslie, an Irish widow visiting Mexico, finds herself equally repelled and fascinated by what she sees as the primitive cruelty of the country. As she becomes involved with Don Ramon and General Cipriano, her perceptions change. Caught up in the plans of these two men to revive the old Aztec religion and political order, she submits to the 'blood-consciousness' and phallic power that they represent. Подробнее

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