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Effi Briest is steered into marriage with a man twenty years her senior, and taken to live in a remote Baltic seaport. Isolated and bored, she drifts into an affair, which is quickly ended. Years later the past catches up with Effi, with profound consequences. Fontane's masterpiece, the novel is an acute portrait of Prussian society.

Plantagenet Palliser's fragile coalition government and troubled marriage is set against the social climbing of the unscrupulous financial speculator Ferdinand Lopez, whose relationship with Emily Wharton generates misery and scandal. Part of the Palliser series, the novel is one of Trollope's most complex.

Part reminiscence, part meditation, Reveries of the Solitary Walker is Rousseau's last great work, the enduring testimony of an alienated person seeking self-knowledge. As he records his walks round Paris, he finds happiness in solitude and nature. The new translation includes an introduction and notes that explore the work and its contexts.

Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is a private notebook of philosophical reflections with universal significance. Drawing on Stoic philosophy, Marcus confronts challenges that affect us all in our struggle to live meaningful lives. This edition includes a selection of Marcus' correspondence with his tutor Fronto which complements the Meditations.

In The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (1888), Flora Annie Steel and her co-author Grace Gardiner give practical and highly opinionated advice to young memsahibs in India. Covering all aspects of household management from the duties of servants to recipes, the manual sheds fascinating light on the entire imperial experience.

First published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series, this comprehensive selection of Kipling's stories and poems covers the full range of his career. It displays Kipling's comic mastery as well as his bleak insights into human behaviour, from the days of British India to the aftermath of the First World War. With Introduction and full notes.

Leroux's classic Gothic melodrama, here freshly presented in a vivid new translation, with informative introduction and notes. The original novel behind Andrew Lloyd Webber's famous musical, The Phantom of the Opera tells of the masked Phantom whose obsessive love for Christine Daae sets in chain a series of terrifying events.

This new translation includes Kafka's two published collections, A Country Doctor and A Hunger Artist with other, uncollected stories, aphorisms, and parables that have become part of the Kafka canon. Enigmatic, satirical, often bleakly humorous, the stories meditate on art and artists and the human experience. Includes an introduction and notes.

A young man, in despair over gambling debts, buys a magical animal skin that grants his every wish but hastens its owner's death in the process. Balzac's compelling tale is here presented in an exuberant new translation, with an illuminating introduction and notes.

The Fortune of the Rougons is the first in Zola's famous Rougon-Macquart series of novels. Not only the inaugural novel, it is the series' founding text, establishing its genealogical basis. The family's greed and rapacity mirrors the diseased society in which it flourishes. This lively new translation is accompanied by introduction and notes.

This edition presents a critically established text based on comparisons of every revised version. Hardy placed this tale among his Novels of Character and Environment, a group which is held to include his most characteristic work.

A Case of Hysteria reveals how Freud dealt with patients and interpreted their statements. A crucial text in the development of his theories, it is famous for its literary qualities, and the story of 'Dora' and her unhappy family is as dramatic as a modern novel. This new translation includes a fascinating introduction to the work.

Set in a fictional Whitby at the turn of the eighteenth century, Sylvia's Lovers (1863) is a compelling story of an ordinary girl's tragic passion for a man who disappears. This wide-ranging new edition includes freshly researched notes and considers the novel's debates with the legacy of the Brontes.

M. R. James's classic ghost stories are some of the finest in English, creating menace and terror in lonely country houses and remote inns. This is the only one-volume edition to include all James's published stories, an appendix of James's writings on the ghost story, and a critical introduction and notes.

Godwin's Political Justice is the founding work of philosophical anarchism. Drawing on the principles of liberty and utility Godwin criticizes government and all forms of secular and religious authority, advocating the free exercise of individual judgement. He raises enduring questions about the nature of our duty to others.

Money centres on the figure of Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, and his unscrupulous money-making schemes. His story intertwines the worlds of politics, finance, and the press, and resonates disturbingly with our own times. This is the first new translation for more than a hundred years, and the first unabridged translation in English.

This new selection of 12 of the best Sherlock Holmes stories is designed to give a full sense of their world, taking Holmes's career from its early days to its close. It includes the book-length The Sign of the Four and an introduction and notes by Barry McCrea that give a sense of the different currents running beneath the stories' surface.

Daniel Deronda, George Eliot's last great novel, charts the intertwined lives of spirited Gwendolen Harleth and the idealistic Deronda. Both are damaged by their pasts, and alienated from the society around them, in a story set against the backdrop of economic crisis, political uncertainty, and proto-Zionism.

A fully revised translation of the great collection of Norse-Icelandic mythological and heroic poetry known as the Poetic Edda, containing the narratives of the creation of the world and the coming of Ragnarok, the Doom of the Gods. Gods, giants, and human heroes populate the poems. This edition includes three new poems.

One of the most influential Gothic novels, The Castle of Otranto established the literary effects associated with the genre: an ancient castle, secret passages, supernatural visitations, an innocent girl threatened with violence, sudden revelations, terror, and excitement. This new edition explores the reasons for the novel's impact.

Regarded by many as Woolf's greatest achievement, The Waves follows a set of six friends from childhood to middle age. As the contours of their lives are revealed, a unique novel is unveiled. In this new edition David Bradshaw considers its spellbinding oddness and originality, helping the reader through this most poetic and haunting of novels.

Orlando tells the tale of an extraordinary individual who lives through history first as a man, then as a woman. At its heart is the figure of Woolf's friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Knole, the historic home of the Sackvilles. Orlando mocks the conventions of biography and history and wryly examines sexual double standards.

John Bold loves Eleanor Harding, but is campaigning against her father, the Warden, for mismanagement of charitable funds. This witty love story combines a comic portrayal of life in an English cathedral close with larger social and political issues. This edition includes Trollope's last Barset fiction 'The Two Heroines of Plumplington'.

Barchester Towers (1857) was the book that made Trollope's reputation and it remains his most popular and enjoyable novel. The arrival of a new bishop in Barchester sets the town in turmoil: who will come out on top in the battle between the archdeacon, the bishop, Mr Slope, and Mrs Proudie?

The only autobiography by a major Victorian novelist, Trollope's account offers a fascinating insight into his literary life and opinions. This edition shows how he exaggerated to create his compelling narrative, and includes other writings to show how subtle and complex his approach to literature really was.

The Book of Margery Kempe is the extraordinary account of a medieval wife, mother, and mystic. The earliest autobiography in English, It describes Kempe's transformation from businesswoman to pilgrim, her visions, hostile encounters with clergy and travels to holy sites abroad. This new translation provides full introduction and notes.

In his Enquiry Edmund Burke overturned the Platonic tradition in aesthetics and replaced metaphysics with psychology. His revolutions in method and sensibility influenced later philosophers and literary and artistic movements from the Gothic novel to Romanticism and beyond. This new edition guides the reader through Burke's arguments.

Young Maggie Tulliver is devoted to her brother Tom, but as she grows older and discovers romantic love she comes into conflict with him and her family. She strives to reconcile moral claims and family loyalty with her own desires. Eliot's most autobiographical novel was also her most controversial, and this new edition examines its impact.

Disraeli vividly depicts the appalling conditions of the poor - their pitiful wages, their miserably overcrowded tenements, and thier exploitation by the new breed of powerful industrialists - as an indirect plea for social and political reform and for the fulfilment of his dream of a new, more democratic England.