The Portrait of a Lady tells the compelling and ultimately tragic tale of a beautiful young American woman's encounter with European sophistication. Set principally in England and Italy, the story follows Isabel Archer's fortunes as a variety of admirers vie for her hand. Her choice will be crucial, and she is not wanting for advice, whether from the generous-spirited Ralph Touchett or the charming Madame Merle.

Wealthy Maggie Verver has everything she could ever ask for - except a husband and a title. While in Italy, acquiring art for his museum back in the States, Maggie’s millionaire father, Adam, decides to remedy this and acquire a husband for Maggie. Enter Prince Amerigo, of a titled but now poor aristocratic Florentine family. Amerigo is the perfect candidate.

One of the wittiest and most scathing of Henry James' novellas, The Aspern Papers chronicles the attempt to extract the valuable letters of the famous and recently deceased poet Jeffrey Aspern from the hands of his past lover and formidable adversary in the battle Juliana Bordereau. The plot was reputedly suggested to James by a story he heard of an illicit attempt to get hold of several of Lord Byron's letters.

Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Emmy winner Emma Thompson lends her immense talent and experienced voice to Henry James' Gothic ghost tale, The Turn of the Screw. When a governess is hired to care for two children at a British country estate, she begins to sense an otherworldly presence around the grounds. Are they really ghosts she's seeing? Or is something far more sinister at work?

Eugenia, an American expatriate brought up in Europe, arrives in rural New England with her charming brother Felix, hoping to find a wealthy second husband after the collapse of her marriage to a German prince. Their exotic, sophisticated airs cause quite a stir with their affluent, God-fearing American cousins, the Wentworth's - and provoke the disapproval of their uncle, suspicious of foreign influences.

Mrs Gereth, a wealthy widow, is dreading the day that her son, Owen, gets married. She hopes that he will marry a woman who will appreciate their home and all of its treasures as she does. So she enlists the help of Fleda Vetch to try to corrupt the impending marriage of her son and Mona Brigstock - a philistine who is determined to marry Owen in order to inherit Mrs Gereth’s valuable possessions and home by any means. Meanwhile, Fleda hides her real feelings towards Owen. Even when he ends up feeling the same way, Fleda cannot bring herself to marry him as this would force him to break his engagement to Mona, and thus betray all of her own ideals.

First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was 25, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author’s former neighbours in his native Lübeck.

Self-made American millionaire Christopher Newman arrives in Paris brimming with hope and optimism, excited to experience the culture and, hopefully, find the perfect woman to become his wife. After a chance encounter with American expatriate friends, his attention is drawn to Madame de Cintré, 25-year-old widowed daughter of the late Marquis de Bellegarde. Having fallen on hard times, the centuries-old aristocratic family permits Newman's courtship to proceed; however, they later persuade the widow to break off her engagement to the nouveau-riche businessman.

Nightmare Alley is American author William Lindsay Gresham’s first and best-known work. The novel - most admired by noir fiction fans - was published in 1946, adapted into a film in 1947 starring Tyrone Power and subsequently printed as a graphic novel by Spain Rodriquez. During the 1940s Gresham worked as an editor for a genuine crime pulp magazine in New York, during which period he wrote this book; characters range from hustlers to Machiavellian femme fatales in a dark world of show business.

Dorothea Brooke is an ardent idealist who represses her vivacity and intelligence for the cold, theological pedant Casaubon. One man understands her true nature: the artist Will Ladislaw. But how can love triumph against her sense of duty and Casaubon’s mean spirit? Meanwhile, in the little world of Middlemarch, the broader world is mirrored: the world of politics, social change, and reforms, as well as betrayal, greed, blackmail, ambition, and disappointment.

Between the World Wars, the six Mitford sisters—each more beautiful, brilliant, and eccentric than the next—dominate the English political, literary, and social scenes. Though they've weathered scandals before, the family falls into disarray when Diana divorces her wealthy husband to marry a fascist leader and Unity follows her sister's lead all the way to Munich, inciting rumors that she's become Hitler's mistress.

Anne Elliot has grieved for seven years over the loss of her first love, Captain Frederick Wentworth. But events conspire to unravel the knots of deceit and misunderstanding in this beguiling and gently comic story of love and fidelity.

Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and to devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding, Lucrezia is thrust into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf. Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must make her way in a court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed.

Hans Castorp is, on the face of it, an ordinary man in his early 20s, on course to start a career in ship engineering in his home town of Hamburg, when he decides to travel to the Berghof Santatorium in Davos. The year is 1912 and an oblivious world is on the brink of war. Castorp’s friend Joachim Ziemssen is taking the cure and a three-week visit seems a perfect break before work begins. But when Castorp arrives he is surprised to find an established community of patients, and little by little, he gets drawn into the closeted life and the individual personalities of the residents.

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.

Published in 1904, The Golden Bowl is the last completed novel of Henry James. In it, the widowed American Adam Verver is in Europe with his daughter Maggie. They are rich, finely appreciative of European art and culture, and deeply attached to each other. Maggie has all the innocent charm of so many of Jamess young American heroines. She is engaged to Amerigo, an impoverished Italian prince; he must marry money, and as his name suggests, an American heiress is the perfect solution.

Eugenia, an American expatriate brought up in Europe, arrives in rural New England with her charming brother Felix, hoping to find a wealthy second husband after the collapse of her marriage to a German prince. Their exotic, sophisticated airs cause quite a stir with their affluent, God-fearing American cousins, the Wentworth's - and provoke the disapproval of their uncle, suspicious of foreign influences.

Mrs Gereth, a wealthy widow, is dreading the day that her son, Owen, gets married. She hopes that he will marry a woman who will appreciate their home and all of its treasures as she does. So she enlists the help of Fleda Vetch to try to corrupt the impending marriage of her son and Mona Brigstock - a philistine who is determined to marry Owen in order to inherit Mrs Gereth’s valuable possessions and home by any means. Meanwhile, Fleda hides her real feelings towards Owen. Even when he ends up feeling the same way, Fleda cannot bring herself to marry him as this would force him to break his engagement to Mona, and thus betray all of her own ideals.

When Isabel Archer, a young American woman with looks, wit, and imagination, arrives in Europe, she sees the world as "a place of brightness, of free expression, of irresistible action". She turns aside from suitors who offer her their wealth and devotion to follow her own path.

Milly Theale is a young, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy American. When she arrives in London and meets the equally beautiful but impoverished Kate Croy, they form an intimate friendship. But nothing is as it seems: materialism, romance, self-delusion, and ultimately fatal illness insidiously contaminate the glamorous social whirl.

In three beautifully crafted, dramatic acts, James's little-known novel unravels the painfully complicated emotional bonds which exist within a group of friends and lovers connected by two neighboring homes as they fight publicly for preferment, reciprocation, and successful marriage....

When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American, is brought to Europe by her wealthy aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to enjoy the freedom that her fortune has opened up and to determine her own fate, does not hesitate to turn down two eligible suitors, declaring that she will never marry. It is only when she finds herself irresistibly drawn to the cultivated but worthless Gilbert Osmond that she discovers that wealth is a two-edged sword.

The Portrait of a Lady tells the compelling and ultimately tragic tale of a beautiful young American woman's encounter with European sophistication. Set principally in England and Italy, the story follows Isabel Archer's fortunes as a variety of admirers vie for her hand. Her choice will be crucial, and she is not wanting for advice, whether from the generous-spirited Ralph Touchett or the charming Madame Merle.

Edith Wharton stands among the finest writers of early 20th-century America. In The Custom of the Country, Wharton’s scathing social commentary is on full display through the beautiful and manipulative Undine Spragg. When Undine convinces her nouveau riche parents to move to New York, she quickly injects herself into high society. But even a well-to-do husband isn’t enough for Undine, whose overwhelming lust for wealth proves to be her undoing.

Maisie is an innocent six year-old, torn between her divorced parents, pathetically isolated yet tragically involved.

Self-made American millionaire Christopher Newman arrives in Paris brimming with hope and optimism, excited to experience the culture and, hopefully, find the perfect woman to become his wife. After a chance encounter with American expatriate friends, his attention is drawn to Madame de Cintré, 25-year-old widowed daughter of the late Marquis de Bellegarde. Having fallen on hard times, the centuries-old aristocratic family permits Newman's courtship to proceed; however, they later persuade the widow to break off her engagement to the nouveau-riche businessman.

Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield’s wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist’s voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie. The lively, loving heroine once gave Driffield enough material to last a lifetime, but now her memory casts an embarrassing shadow over his career and respectable image.

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.

Howards End is a beautifully subtle tale of two very different families brought together by an unusual event. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes are practical and materialistic, leading lives of "telegrams and anger". When the elder Mrs. Wilcox dies and her family discovers she has left their country home - Howards End - to one of the Schlegel sisters, a crisis between the two families is precipitated that takes years to resolve.

In the coming-of-age story, we follow a young Italian nobleman, Fabrizio Valserra, Marchesino del Dongo, on many adventures, including his experiences at the Battle of Waterloo, and romantic intrigues.