Hyacinth Robinson, drawn into the London underworld of revolutionary politics, vows to assassinate an enemy of the people. His exposure to the Princess Casamassima's world of art, nobility, and beauty leads him to lose faith in his cause.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Published in 1897, The Spoils of Poynton is one of the quintessential works of James's middle period. The "spoils" of the book's title refer to furniture and other objets d'art that the widow Adela Gereth moves to her cottage so that they are kept away from the clutches of her coarse future daughter-in-law, Mona Brigstock. However, events take an unexpected turn when her married son Owen is attracted to her friend, Fleda Vetch.

Taking place in Boston, Massachusetts, a decade after the Civil War, The Bostonians tells the story of two cousins who battle for the affections of and control over an enchanting prophetess. While visiting his cousin Olive Chancellor, a fierce feminist deeply involved in the Suffragette movement, Basil Ransom, a Confederate Civil War veteran turned lawyer, attends a speech by the talented young orator Verena Tarrant. Basil quickly falls in love with Verena, although he disagrees with her politics; Olive, however, sees her as the future of the women's rights movement.

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?

Travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman, presents her fellow countryman Winterbourne with a dilemma he cannot resolve. Is she deliberately flouting social convention in the outspoken way she talks and acts, or is she simply ignorant of those conventions? When she strikes up an intimate friendship with an urbane young Italian, her flat refusal to observe the codes of respectable behaviour leave her perilously exposed.

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.

It is a June day in London in 1923, and the lovely Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Whom will she see? Her friend Peter, back from India, who has never really stopped loving her? What about Sally, with whom Clarissa had her life’s happiest moment? Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith is struggling with his life on the same London day.

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.

The young Monica Madden cries for two days before her marriage to Edmund Widdowson; the ensuing claustrophobia, which opens the door for the more desirable Bevis, contrasts with Rhoda's independence - yet Rhoda's own principles are tested when she falls in love rather by accident.... The Odd Women is a remarkable book, ultimately optimistic in its hope for a societal shift that will benefit both men and women alike.

In Madame Bovary, one of the great novels of 19th-century France, Flaubert draws a deeply felt and sympathetic portrait of a woman who, having married a country doctor and found herself unhappy with a rural, genteel existence, longs for love and excitement. However, her aspirations and her desires to escape only bring her further disappointment and eventually lead to unexpected, painful consequences. Flaubert’s critical portrait of bourgeois provincial life remains as powerful as ever

Written before she began her experiments in the writing of fiction, Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day, is a story about a group of young people trying to discover what it means to fall in love. It asks all the big questions: What does it mean to fall in love? Does marriage grant happiness? What is happiness? Night and Day is a conventional novel; however, it maps out for us the world of Virginia Woolf in its wondrous prose: For her it was the beginning, leading on to a prolonged engagement with her search for the means to express the "inner life".

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.

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.

Published in 1897, The Spoils of Poynton is one of the quintessential works of James's middle period. The "spoils" of the book's title refer to furniture and other objets d'art that the widow Adela Gereth moves to her cottage so that they are kept away from the clutches of her coarse future daughter-in-law, Mona Brigstock. However, events take an unexpected turn when her married son Owen is attracted to her friend, Fleda Vetch.

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.

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.

American Lambert Strether is sent to Paris on behalf of Mrs. Newsome, his fiancée, to collect her son, Chad. When Strether finds Chad, he discovers an altered man and becomes introduced to a free and unconventional style of life that soon intoxicates him. His views begin to change; the morality of Woollett, his hometown, becomes foreign, and the "ambassador" loses sight of his mission....

Thérèse is a half Algerian orphan, brought up in provincial France by her aunt and married off to her sickly cousin Camille. His ambition takes the three of them to Paris, where they set up home in the dank and dingy backstreets that run down to the Seine. The relentless tedium of life for Thérèse is eventually broken by the presence of Camille’s unscrupulous friend Laurent, sparking a series of increasingly desperate acts.

Written before she began her experiments in the writing of fiction, Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day, is a story about a group of young people trying to discover what it means to fall in love. It asks all the big questions: What does it mean to fall in love? Does marriage grant happiness? What is happiness? Night and Day is a conventional novel; however, it maps out for us the world of Virginia Woolf in its wondrous prose: For her it was the beginning, leading on to a prolonged engagement with her search for the means to express the "inner life".

Against a backdrop of modernisation, extravagant luxury, political intrigue and sexual immorality, Saccard treats close relationships as money-making opportunities and loved ones as mere commodities. As one character puts it: ‘You see, everything is fine, as long as you make money from it.’

After the collapse of her marriage to an illustrious German prince, Baroness Eugenia Münster arrives in America with her brother, in search of wealthy New England relatives. The duo have an immediate impact on their American cousins, the Wentworths. The Baroness captures the eye of young Clifford Wentworth, and his girlfriend's older brother Robert; meanwhile, Felix falls for his American cousin Gertrude. The Wentworths are overawed by their European cousins and their frivolous lifestyle. What unfolds is a delightful comedy of manners.

Upon arriving home in Normandy, Frederick catches his first glimpse of Marie Arnoux, a mysterious and beautiful woman who leaves a lasting impression on him. Eventually they make each other's acquaintance and Marie becomes a symbol of unattainable perfection for Frederick, whose unrequited infatuation leaves him bouncing from one passion to another, falling in and out of love, money and society.

Hester (1883) is a dramatic story of female power and family tensions within Victorian society. Using her own money, Catherine Vernon manages to save the family bank from collapse after her cousin John absconds with some of its money. As the matriarch of Redborough, Catherine is used to commanding authority, but this is challenged with the arrival of John’s strong and capable teenage daughter, Hester. Ignorant of her father’s conduct, Hester takes against Catherine and a mutual antipathy soon sets in. A masterpiece of domestic realism, the novel is one of Mrs Oliphant’s most admired works.

The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf's haunting tale about a naïve young woman's sea voyage from London to a small resort on the South American coast. In symbolic, lyrical, and intoxicating prose, her outward journey begins to mirror her internal voyage into adulthood as she searches for her personal identity, grapples with love, and learns how to face life intellectually and emotionally. Its wit and exquisiteness, and its profound depth and insight into humanity, will capture the imagination of the listener.

Set in the financial centres of 1820s Frankfurt and London, Jezebel’s Daughter (1880) tells the story of two widows: Madame Fontaine, who will go to any lengths to secure her daughter’s marriage, and Mrs Wagner, who devotes herself to her late husband’s social reforms. In pursuit of her endeavours, Mrs Wagner befriends Jack Straw, a former inmate of Bedlam, who plays a pivotal role as the action, full of plotting and counterplotting, unfolds, culminating in the morgue, where several lives hang in the balance.

Bachelor John Marcher is haunted by the premonition that something terrible lies in store for him, like a "beast in the jungle" lying in wait. So he spends his life in idleness, unable to carry out his dreams or desires, while his friend May Bartram, curious to see how this spectacular fate will manifest, helps watch out for the arrival of the beast.