“George Eliot” was the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans, one of the greatest of English novelists of the Victorian era. Her long novel Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, is generally considered to be her finest work.

Published in eight installments between 1871 and 1872, Middlemarch tells the intertwined stories of a variety of people living

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Written in 1927, To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf's experimental and brilliant third novel. The narrative concerns the annual visits by the Ramsay family to their summer home in the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920. Once again employing her unique, stream-of-consciousness style of writing, Woolf creates a fascinating and complex novel where the point of view of the narration switches between the various Ramsay family members and their...

Set in the magical Wessex landscape so familiar from Thomas Hardy's early work, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is unique among his great novels for the intense feeling that he lavished upon his heroine, Tess, a pure woman betrayed by love. Hardy poured all of his profound empathy for both humanity and the rhythms of natural life into this story of her beauty, goodness, and tragic fate. In so doing, he created a character who, like Emma Bovary and Anna...

The first novel of Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire series, this work introduces the fictional cathedral town of Barchester and many of its clerical inhabitants. Originally published in 1855, the story centers on Mr. Septimus Harding who has been granted the comfortable wardenship of Hiram's Hospital, an almshouse from a medieval charity of the diocese. Mr. Harding, a fundamentally good man and an excellent musician, conscientiously fulfills his...

"Sir Phillip knew that Eloise Bridgerton was a spinster, and so he'd proposed, figuring that she'd be homely and unassuming, and more than a little desperate for an offer of marriage. Except ... she wasn't. The beautiful woman on his doorstep was anything but quiet, and when she stopped talking long enough to close her mouth, all he wanted to do was kiss her--and more"--

Filled with macabre mansions, things that go bump in the night and a healthy dose of farce, ‘Northanger Abbey’ is Jane Austen’s first novel and a satirical parody of the Gothic tradition. As far as being seventeen goes, daydreaming yourself away as center stage in some dramatic and intense story is pretty standard fare. Such is the case for sweet and naïve Catherine Morland, who longs for the sort of adventure she reads about in the popular...

The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London's funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley's former students, works hard to earn a degree from Oxford and becomes an investment banker; Carole's mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about...

Jane Austen famously wrote: "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." Emma Woodhouse is perhaps Jane Austen’s most seductive and complicated character, filled with intrigue and uniqueness. Despite having decided to never marry, precocious Emma Woodhouse is a self proclaimed cupid that has taken it upon herself to help her friends find eligible matches. As it becomes evident that the judgement of her matchmaking abilities...

Bryson takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, showing how each room has figured in the evolution of private life.