Austen wrote, 'I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like' and thus introduces the handsome, clever, rich - and flawed, Emma Woodhouse. Emma is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage; nothing however delights her more than matchmaking her fellow residents of Highbury. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protegee Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected.

All of Edgar Allan Poe’s great short stories in one 16-hour collection.

Swann’s Way is the first of seven volumes in Remembrance of Things Past. It sets the scene with the narrator’s memories being famously provoked by the taste of that little cake, the madeleine, accompanied by a cup of lime-flowered tea. It is an unmatched portrait of fin-de-siècle France.

In a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family of Salem.

Have you ever wished you could live in an earlier, more romantic era? Ladies, welcome to the 19th century, where there's arsenic in your face cream, a pot of cold pee sits under your bed, and all of your underwear is crotchless. (Why? Shush, dear. A lady doesn't question.) Unmentionable is your hilarious, scandalously honest (yet never crass) guide to the secrets of Victorian womanhood.

At the shabby boarding house in the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, petty Madame Vauquer and her tenants wonder at the plight of the aging resident Goriot. Once a well-heeled merchant, Goriot was, at first, afforded special treatment from the Madame. But now something is clearly amiss in his financial affairs, and his increasingly tawdry appearance makes him a subject of ridicule in the household.

On a visit to the estate of her friend, the young and beautiful Isobel, countess of Scargrave, Jane bears witness to a tragedy. Isobel's husband - a gentleman of mature years - is felled by a mysterious and agonizing ailment. The earl's death seems a cruel blow of fate for the newly married Isobel. Yet the bereaved widow soon finds that it's only the beginning of her misfortune...as she receives a sinister missive accusing her and the earl's nephew of adultery - and murder. Desperately afraid that the letter will expose her to the worst sort of scandal, Isobel begs Jane for help.

The first of Jane Austen's novels to be published, Sense and Sensibility marked the debut of England's primary novelist of manners. Convinced that "three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work upon", Austen created a brilliant tragicomedy of flirtation and folly.

Following Jane from her childhood as an orphan in Northern England through her experience as a governess at Thornfield Hall, Charlotte Brontë's Gothic classic is an early exploration of women's independence in the mid-19th century and the pervasive societal challenges women had to endure. At Thornfield, Jane meets the complex and mysterious Mr. Rochester, with whom she shares a complicated relationship that ultimately forces her to reconcile the conflicting passions of romantic love and religious piety.

One of the most important novels in classic literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter tackles the subject of adultery, with the notorious Hester Prynne at the forefront of the scandal in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the beginning of the novel, Hester is serving time in prison for having a child out of wedlock and is forced to wear a scarlet A on her clothing at all times, so she cannot run from her sin no matter where she goes.

Riotous, sexy and groundbreaking, Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews: The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, published in 1742, was one of the first English novels. Fielding was melding and parodying the two major forces battling for control of the fiction market at the time - the mock heroic, neoclassical tradition as practiced by Pope and Swift and the popular and populist fiction of the new novelists such as Defoe and Richardson.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a fascinating portrait of 19th-century Europe - disillusioned and ravaged by the wars of the postrevolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Our protagonist, whose breathtaking journey eerily echoes Byron's own life story, forgoes his destiny back home for the exciting unknown - the nature of humanity and the transformative effects of travel burst through the pages in four powerful cantos of Spenserian stanzas. Here is the poem that set Byron on his meteoric rise to fame in London society.

Mary Wollstonecraft, often described as the first major feminist, is remembered principally as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and there has been a tendency to view her most famous work in isolation. Yet Wollstonecraft's pronouncements about women grew out of her reflections about men, and her views on the female sex constituted an integral part of a wider moral and political critique of her times which she first fully formulated in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).

In one of the first novels in the English language, we follow the picaresque adventures of Joseph Andrews, a virtuous young man who is keen to maintain his innocence despite being coerced by nearly every woman he encounters.

In this definitive collection of essays, including the poignant title essay "Self-Reliance," Ralph Waldo Emerson expounds on the importance of trusting your soul, as well as divine providence, to carve out a life. A firm believer in nonconformity, Emerson celebrates the individual and stresses the value of listening to the inner voice unique to each of us—even when it defies society's expectations.

The Professor is Charlotte Brontë's first novel albeit the last to have been published. Edited and distributed by Arthur Bell Nicholls, two years after Brontë's death, it is based on her experiences of living as a language student in Brussels. The Professor follows the career and love affairs of William Crimsworth, a reserved but compassionate aristocrat who has been ostracised by his family and left penniless.

Published just months before his death in 1768, A Sentimental Journey is Sterne's lightly fictionalised account of his own European travels; and being Sterne, it is more about digressions, misunderstandings and risqué jokes than the places he visits. Narrated by the (apparently) innocent Parson Yorick, who appeared in Sterne's other masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, it is full of anecdote and incident, and is far more about the people than the landscapes on the road from Calais.

Devilishly attractive Lord Illingworth is notorious for his skill as a seducer. But he is still invited to all the "best" houses, while his female conquests must hide their shame in seclusion. In this devastating drawing-room comedy, Oscar Wilde uses his celebrated wit to expose English society's narrow view of everything from sexual mores to Americans.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton's book is ostensibly a work of Science Fiction. It deals with an underground race of advanced beings, masters of Vril energy - a strange power that can both heal and destroy - who intend to leave their subterranean existence and conquer the world. But the book has been seen by many as a barely concealed account of Hidden Wisdom, a theory that has attracted many strange bed-fellows, including the French author Louis Jacolliot, the Polish explorer Ferdinand Ossendowsky, and Adolf Hitler.

A performance of the tragi-comedy by the Royal Shakespeare Company. When a young woman is offered the choice of saving a man's life at the price of her own chastity, what should she do? The political and moral corruption of Vienna has driven Duke Vincentio into hiding while his deputy governor, Angelo, is left to revive the old discipline of civic authority. Angelo's first act is to imprison Claudio, a young nobleman who has gotten his betrothed, Juliet, with child.

The simple village vicar, Mr. Primrose, is living with his wife and six children in complete tranquility until unexpected calamities force them to weather one hilarious adventure after another. Goldsmith plays out this classic comedy of manners with a light, ironic touch that is irresistibly charming.

Here in one volume are both the Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series from one of the most influential philosophers in American history. Although Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps America’s most famous philosopher, did not wish to be referred to as a transcendentalist, he is nevertheless considered the founder of this major movement of nineteenth-century American thought. Emerson was influenced by a liberal religious training; theological study; personal contact with the Romanticists Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth; and a strong indigenous sense of individualism and self-reliance.

Have you ever wondered why we wear the type of clothes we do? Packed with outlandish outfits, this exciting history of fashion trends reveals the flamboyant fashions adopted (and discarded) by our ancestors. In the days before cosmetic surgery, people used bum rolls and bombastic breeches to augment their figures, painted their faces with poisonous concoctions, and doused themselves with scent to cover body odor.

The most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas. It is the source of one of Emerson's most famous quotations, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." This essay is a considered a watershed moment in which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement. An American classic.

Hailed as Charlotte Brontë’s “finest novel” by Virginia Woolf, Villette is the timeless semi-autobiographical tale of Lucy Snowe. Left with no family and no money, Lucy goes against her own timid nature and travels to the small city of Villette, France, where she becomes a school teacher in Madame Beck’s school for girls. During her stay, she falls in love—twice—and discovers an independent, inner strength rarely seen in women of her time.

Against Nature was one of the most shocking French novels of the 19th century. When it was published in 1884, it thrilled the aesthetes, the poets, and the intellectuals of Europe on both sides of the Channel (notably Oscar Wilde) because for all its lofty tone, it had, as its core, an unbridled decadence, and it was this same character that challenged, even horrified, established bourgeois society.

Frederic Moreau is a law student returning home to Normandy from Paris when he first notices Mme Arnoux, a slender, dark woman several years older than himself. It is the beginning of an infatuation that will last a lifetime. He befriends her husband, an influential businessman, and their paths cross and re-cross over the years. Through financial upheaval, political turmoil, and countless affairs, Mme Arnoux remains the constant, unattainable love of Moreau’s life.

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most prolific authors of his time, eventually gaining recognition for his tales of horror and his uncanny ability to paint a macabre picture with words. The Complete Works Collection of Edgar Allan Poe contains over 150 stories and poems, separated into individual chapters, including all of Poe's most notorious works such as The Raven, Annabel Lee, A Dream Within a Dream, Lenore, The Tell-Tale Heart, and many more.

The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories is a bizarre and colorful collection containing the finest short stories by the iconic Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. From the witty and Kafkaesque "The Nose", where a civil servant wakes up one day to find his nose missing, to the moving and evocative "The Overcoat", about a reclusive man whose only ambition is to replace his old, threadbare coat, Gogol gives us a unique take on the absurd.

In one of the first novels in the English language, we follow the picaresque adventures of Joseph Andrews, a virtuous young man who is keen to maintain his innocence despite being coerced by nearly every woman he encounters.