Wordsworth

Do you know the difference between «stubborn» and «obstinate», between «cackle» and «chortle»? Learners of English often find it difficult to know which word to use. Or you may have used a particular word several times already in an essay or email, and so you want to use a different expression. This dictionary adopts a fresh approach by going beyond the mere listing of words as in an ordinary thesaurus. Differences between similar words are highlighted to show the various shades of meaning so that you will never be at a loss for the right word on the right occasion.

This selection of Lawrence's work underlines the intensity and innovation that made him one of the most distinctive and important of twentieth-century writers. «Sons and Lovers» — semi-autobiographical, is a powerful exploration of family, class, sexuality and the suffocating relationships of a man with a demanding mother and two very different lovers. «Women in Love» — perhaps Lawrence's most mature novel, was met with disgust by the critics, seeing only a sorry tale of sexual depravity in the love of the sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, for Rupert and Gerald. «Lady Chatterley's Lover» — Lawrence's novel, written in poetic and sexually explicit language, deals with the passionate relationship between Lady Constance Chatterley and Oliver Mellors, her emotionally and physically crippled husband's forthright and powerfully masculine gamekeeper. A watershed in twentieth-century literary fiction, its sensational content has earned the novel an enduring readership and notoriety. Other stories featured in this volume include «The Captain's Dol»l, «The Fox», «The Ladybird», «St Mawr», «The Princess», «The Virgin and the Gypsy» and «The Escaped Cock».

'Nothing is so improbable as what is true' Of all the writers of ghost and horror stories, Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most colourful. He was a dark, cynical and pessimistic soul who had a grim vision of fate and the unfairness of life, which he channelled into his fiction. And in his death, or rather his disappearance, he created a mystery as strange and unresolved as any that he penned himself. But more of that later. Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was born in a log cabin on 21st June 1842, in Horse Creek, Meigs County, Ohio, USA. He was the tenth of thirteen children, ten of whom survived infancy. His father, an unsuccessful farmer with an unseemly love of literature, had given all the Bierce children names beginning with 'A'. There was Abigail, the eldest; then Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius etc. So oddness was a part of Bierce's life from the beginning. Poverty and religion of the extreme variety were the two chief influences on young Ambrose's childhood. He not only hated this period of his life, he also developed a deep hatred for his family and this is reflected in some of his stories which depict families preying on and murdering one another. For example the unforgettable opening sentence of «An Imperfect Conflagration» seems to sum up his bitter attitude: 'Early in 1872 I murdered my father — an act that made a deep impression on me at the time'.

Gertrude Atherton was born in San Francisco in 1857, and died in 1948. She eloped at the age of nineteen, took up writing against her husband's wishes, and after his death became a protegee of Ambrose Bierce, whose influence can be seen here in those stories, «The Dead and the Countess», «Death and the Woman» and «The Striding Place», which have an overtly supernatural element.»The Striding Place» was rejected by one editor as 'far too gruesome', but was in Atherton's view 'the best short story I ever wrote'. Elsewhere, «The Greatest Good of the Greatest Number», «The Tragedy of a Snob», and «A Monarch of a Small Survey» the psychological takes precedence over the supernatural. And in «The Bell in the Fog» (reminiscent of «The Turn of the Screw», and dedicated to Henry James) the supernatural and psychological combine to brilliant effect: an angelic child bears a striking resemblance to an old portrait. Is she a reincarnation of her ancestor? And will she turn out as unangelic in adulthood as that distant ancestor turned out before her?

This title comes with an introduction and notes by Professor Stephen Arkin, San Francisco State University. Katherine Mansfield is widely regarded as a writer who helped create the modern short story. Born in Wellinton, New Zealand in 1888, she came to London in 1903 to attend Queen's College and returned permanently in 1908. Her first book of stories, «In a German Pension», appeared in 1911, and she went on to write and publish an extraordinary body of work. This edition of «The Collected Stories» brings together all of the stories that Mansfield had written up until her death in January of 1923. With an introduction and head-notes, this volume allows the reader to become familiar with the complete range of Mansfield's work from the early, satirical stories set in Bavaria, through the luminous recollections of her childhood in New Zealand, and through the mature, deeply felt stories of her last years. Admired by Virginia Woolf in her lifetime and by many writers since her death, Katherine Mansfield is one of the great literary artists of the twentieth century.

Eight of the twelve tales in this book are from the master hand of Charles Perrault (1628-1703). Although Perrault enjoyed much distinction in the French literary circle of the late seventeenth century, his fame today rests upon his authorship of the traditional Tales of Mother Goose, or Stories of Olden Times. And it is true to say that as long as there are children to listen spellbound to the adventures of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, and that arch rogue Puss in Boots, his memory will endure. Three of the tales, The Ridiculous Wishes, Donkey-Skin and Patient Griselda, are seldom included in Perrault collections as they were written in a very florid verse form. Not only Perrault, but Boccaccio, Chaucer and others have used the story of Patient Griselda. The last story, Beauty and the Beast, again not by Perrault (it was penned by Mme. Leprince de Beaumont 1711-1781), has a similarity of style and celebrity which justifiably merits its inclusion. With the exception of the morals and the three tales taken from verse, the translations are by A.E. Johnson.

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is, for Russians, their greatest writer; Eugene Onegin is his greatest work. Yet it remains little known outside Russia. Attempts to render Pushkin's Russian stanzas into verse have tried in vain to imitate the most inimitable features of the original, while masking many of its other glories. This prose version, for the first time, gives us a Eugene Onegin that is easy and enjoyable to read. Where previous versions lost the novel in the verse, Roger Clarke has discarded the verse to bring us the novel. And more than the novel: what shines through here are not only Puskin's touching story and subtle characterisation, but his incisive pictures of contemporary Russian life and landscapes, his social and literary comment, his humour, and indeed the essential poetry of the work. The addition of four captivating verse-tales from Pushkin's early maturity makes this book a must for anybody interested in Russian or European literature.

In the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a huge cyclone transports the orphan Dorothy and her little dog Toto from Kansas to the Land of Oz, and she fears that she will never see Aunt Em and Uncle Henry ever again. But she meets the Munchkins, and they tell her to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City where the Wonderful Wizard of Oz will grant any wish. On the way, she meets the brainless Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion. The four friends set off to seek their heart's desires, and in a series of actionpacked adventures they encounter a deadly poppy field, fierce animals, flying monkeys, a wicked witch, a good witch, and the Mighty Oz himself. In Glinda of Oz, the last of the original 'Oz' books, Dorothy and Princess Ozma seek the help of Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, when they find themselves in peril on the Magic Isle of the Skeezers.

The story of Oedipus has captured the human imagination as few others. It is the story of a man fated to kill his father and marry his mother, a man who by a cruel irony brings these things to pass by his very efforts to avoid them. But these plays are not about fate, and not about irony. They are about character, choice and consequence. In Antigone, we see a woman who will defy human law, and die for it, rather than transgress the eternal, unwritten laws of the gods. Oedipus the Tyrant is the story of a ruler destroyed by those qualities — pride, determination and belief in his own abilities — which made him ruler in the first place. Finally, in Oedipus at Colonus, written late in Sophocles' life, the aged and blinded king achieves a personal reconciliation, but at a cost — a son who will die in battle against his country, and a daughter who will die burying her brother.

»Tales from Shakespeare», written by Charles and Mary Lamb as an 'introduction to the study of Shakespeare', are much more entertaining than that. All of Shakespeare's best-loved plays, comic and tragic, are retold in a clear and robust style. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. «Tales from King Arthur», edited by Andrew Lang, takes the reader into the romantic world of the gallant Knights of the Round Table. It tells of their brave and chivalrous deeds, fair maidens, the quest for the Holy Grail, and the tragic love of King Arthur for Guinevere. The most potent of the mist-enshrouded tales of adventure passed down from pre-recorded history, the Arthurian legends have as much appeal today as they did in the days of the troubadors. «Tales from the Arabian Nights», also edited by Andrew Lang, tells of the beautiful Scheherazade. Her husband has threatened to kill her, so each night she diverts him with tales of fantastic adventure, leaving each story unfinished so that he spares her life to hear the ending on the morrow. Illustrated by H.J Ford, the tales include Aladdin, The Enchanted Horse, Sinbad the Sailor and the great Caliph of Bagdad, Haroun-al-Raschid. «Tales of Troy and Greece» allow Andrew Lang to draw on his classical knowledge to retell the Homeric legend of the wars between the Greeks and the Trojans. Paris, the lovely Helen of Troy, Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, the Amazons and the famous Wooden Horse all feature in this magical introduction to one of the greatest legends ever told.

Pride & Prejudice Jane Austen constructed Pride & Prejudice, with wit, social precision and an irresistible heroine. Beginning with one of the most famous sentences in English Literature, it is a perfect ironic novel of manners. Persuasion Jane Austen's question 'What is persuasion?' — a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? — is the force behind this novel. Anne Elliot, one of Austen's quietest yet strongest heroines, is also open to change. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte's poor, plain, but plucky heroine, possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte's tale is a wild, passionate story of intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and the adopted foundling Heathcliff. Humiliated by Hindley, Catherine's brother, Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights, but in time he returns to exact a terrible revenge. Tess of the d'Urbervilles Set in Hardy's Wessex, Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a moving novel of hypocrisy and double standards. It tells of Tess Durbeyfield, a poor village girl, her relationships with two very different men, her fluctuating fortunes and her search for respectability.

»The Jungle Book» introduces Mowgli, the boy foundling adopted by a family of wolves, Shere Khan the tiger, Bagheera the black panther and Baloo the sleepy brown bear. How did the Leopard get his spots? How did the Elephant get his trunk? In Just So Stories Kipling wittily supplies the answers to these and other questions. «Puck of Pook's Hill» relates how Dan and Una's magical meeting with Puck, the last of the People of the Hills, leads to their adventures with Romans and Crusaders, Saxons and Vikings... And later, in «Rewards and Fairies», the three meet an array of characters ranging from Iron Age warriors to 'Good Queen Bess' and Sir Francis Drake. In Kipling's rattling school yarn «Stalky & Co», Stalky, M'Turk and the Beetle are a trio of scallywags with a keen desire to break the rules, their unruly activities give the stories an enduring appeal to all children — especially those who have ever wilted beneath the stern glance of a peevish schoolmaster. Kipling's wry, sometimes tongue-in-cheek style will delight and entertain young readers while adults throughout the world will remember his stories with affection.

Jane Austen is without question, one of England's most enduring and skilled novelists. With her wit, social precision, and unerring ability to create some of literature's most charismatic and believable heroines, she mesmerises her readers as much today as when her novels were first published. Whether it is her sharp, ironic gaze at the Gothic genre invoked by the adventures of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey; the diffident and much put-upon Fanny Price struggling to cope with her emotions in Mansfield Park; her delightfully paced comedy of manners and the machinations of the sisters Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility; the quiet strength of Anne Elliot in Persuasion succeeding in a world designed to subjugate her very existence; and Emma — 'a heroine whom no one but myself will like' teased Austen — yet another irresistible character on fire with imagination and foresight. Indeed not unlike her renowned creator. Jane Austen is as sure-footed in her steps through society's whirlpools of convention and prosaic mores as she is in her sometimes restrained but ever precise and enduring prose.

1348. The Black Death is sweeping through Europe. In Florence, plague has carried off one hundred thousand people. In their Tuscan villas, seven young women and three young men tell tales to recreate the world they have lost, weaving a rich tapestry of comedy, tragedy, ribaldry and farce. Boccaccio's Decameron recasts the storytelling heritage of the ancient and medieval worlds into perennial forms that inspired writers from Chaucer and Shakespeare down to our own day. Boccaccio makes the incredible believable, with detail so sharp we can look straight into the lives of people who lived six hundred years ago. His Decameron hovers between the fading glories of an aristocratic past — the Crusades, the Angevins, the courts of France, the legendary East — and the colourful squalor of contemporary life, where wives deceive husbands, friars and monks pursue fleshly ends, and natural instincts fight for satisfaction. Here are love and jealousy, passion and pride — and a shrewd calculation of profit and loss which heralds the rise of a dynamic merchant class. These stories show us early capitalism during a moment of crisis and revelation.

»The Wordsworth Dictionary of English Spelling» is the only spelling dictionary to give concise meanings throughout, and the only full-size spelling dictionary to have boxed features on spelling rules. Quicker, clearer, and easier to use than a conventional dictionary, it includes the latest additions to the English language (for instance, new words such as helpline, karaoke, synergy and teleworking). It is also comprehensive — featuring 50,000 spellings at a glance; informative — with concise meanings given throughout, and helpful, with 175 panels showing spelling rules and tips

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is, for Russians, their greatest writer; «Eugene Onegin» is his greatest work. Yet it remains little known outside Russia. Attempts to render Pushkin's Russian stanzas into verse have tried in vain to imitate the most inimitable feature of the original, while masking many of its glories. This prose version, for the first time, gives us a «Eugene Onegin» that is easy and enjoyable to read.

These Comedies are among the best loved of Shakespeare's plays. In each a problem emerges, is then intensified to a point of maximum confusion and potential upset, before the chaos is resolved, however improbably, into general goodwill and a spate of marriages. The triumph of these plays lies in the way they mingle humorous stage business and dexterous word play with a more serious study of identity, gender, dreaming, the meaning of love, even of the theatre itself. They reassure us that with all its faults, the world will always in the end be redeemable. 'Not for an age but for all time.' So Ben Jonson established what we now take for granted: Shakespeare's unique place among the world's great authors. Romeo and Juliet shows us the archetypal story of fated young love; Hamlet, the tortured psyche of the young prince of Denmark; Othello, a strikingly modern representation of racial difference; King Lear, a man stripped of all material and psychological comforts; and Macbeth, a dark investigation of the origins and effects of, evil. The plays throw a fascinating light on the concerns of Shakespeare's day, yet offer perennial insights into the nature of human emotion.

With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the novel with which D.H. Lawrence is most often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a world-wide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated edition to the general public. The famous ‘trial of Lady Chatterley’ heralded the sexual revolution of the coming decades and signalled the defeat of Establishment prudery. Yet Lawrence himself was hardly a liberationist and the conservativism of many aspects of his novel would later lay it open to attacks from the political avant-garde and from feminists. The story of how the wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley responds when her husband returns from the war paralysed from the waist down, and of the tender love which then develops between her and her husband’s gamekeeper, is a complex one open to a variety of conflicting interpretations. This edition of the novel offers an occasion for a new generation of readers to discover what all the fuss was about; to appraise Lawrence’s bitter indictment of modern industrial society, and to ask themselves what lessons there might be for the 21st century in his intense exploration of the complicated relations between love and sex.

»Adam Bede» was George Eliot's first full-length novel. Set in the English Midlands of farmers and village craftsmen at the turn of the eighteenth century, the book tells a story of seduction, and is also a pioneering record of a long lost rural world. «Middlemarch» is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate, illuminating the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century. «The Mill on the Floss» is a masterpiece of ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian age. Maggie Tulliver's love for her brother Tom turns to conflict. His bourgeois standards contrasting with her own lively intelligence, and the result, is tragedy. «Silas Marner» tells the tender and moving story of the unjustly exiled linen weaver, Silas Marner of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England. It tells of how he is restored to life and his sadness ended by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie.

Lord Jim, first published in 1900, confirmed Conrad's place in literature as one of the first 'modernists' of English letters. Set in the Malay Archipelago, not only does the novel provide a gripping account of maritime adventure and romance, but also an exotic tale of the East. Nostromo is the only man capable of the decisive action needed to save the silver of the San Tome mine and secure independence for Sulaco, Occidental Province of the Latin American state of Costaguana. Is his integrity as unassailable as everyone believes, or will his ideals, like those which have inspired the struggling state itself, buckle under economic and political pressure? The Secret Agent, Conrad's story of espionage and anarchists, tells of Winnie Verloc and her devotion to her peculiar and simple-minded brother, Stevie. Its savagely witty themes of human absurdity and misunderstanding are written in an ironic style that provokes both laughter and unease. This volume also includes a selection of Conrad's matchless short stories — Youth, Typhoon, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether and The Shadow-Line.

»Jane Eyre» ranks as one of the greatest and most popular works of English fiction. Although Charlotte Brontë's heroine is outwardly plain, she possesses an indomitable spirit, and great courage. Forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order which circumscribes her life when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious, sardonic Mr Rochester. «Villette» is based on Charlotte Brontë's personal experience as a teacher in Brussels. It is a moving tale of repressed feelings and cruel circumstances borne with heroic fortitude. Rising above the confinement of a rigid social order, it is also a story of a woman's right to love and be loved. «Wuthering Heights» is Emily Brontë's wild, passionate tale of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine's brother Hindley and, wrongly believing that his love for Catherine is not reciprocated, he leaves Wuthering heights. When he returns years later as a wealthy man, he proceeds to exact a terrible revenge for his former miseries. «Agnes Grey», Ann Brontë's deeply personal novel, is a trenchant expose of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-nineteenth century. «The Tenant of Wildfell Hall» shows Ann Brontë's bold, naturalistic and passionate style. It is a powerful and sometimes violent novel of expectation, love, oppression, sin and betrayal. It portrays the disintegration of the marriage of Helen Huntingdon, the mysterious 'tenant' of the title, and her dissolute, alcoholic husband.

This collection brings together perhaps the finest of Dickens' shorter novels, filled with event, character, and the unsurpassed brilliance of his story-telling. «Oliver Twist» enhanced and strengthened Dickens' reputation and contains classic Dickensian themes — grinding poverty, desperation, fear, temptation and the eventual triumph of good in the face of great adversity. «Hard Times» was attacked by Macaulay for its 'sullen socialism', but 20th-century critics — George Bernard Shaw and F. R. Leavis praised it in the highest terms. «A Tale of Two Cities», Dickens' greatest historical novel, traces the lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Terror. A fascinating range of characters and Dickens' usual superb command of language combine to make this an exciting and tantalising story.»Great Expectations» traces the life of Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man of character. From its dramatic opening on the bleak Kentish marshes, the story abounds with memorable characters — the blacksmith Joe Gargery, the mysterious convict Abel Magwitch, the eccentric Miss Havisham and the beautiful Estella.

»...it is an universal phenomenon of our nature that the mournful, the fearful, even the horrible, allures with irresistible enchantment.» — Chaucer Burr, Memoir, 1850. «The Wordsworth Book of Horror Stories» is a superb collection of some of the greatest tales of the genre, many are classics while others are lesser-known gems unearthed from this vintage era of the supernatural. From time immemorial, man the world over has drawn upon the worst fears of his conscious and subconscious mind to furnish legends of terror. In this volume, authors such as M. R. James, Le Fanu, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Bierce, Balzac, Gaskell, and many others invite you to close the curtains, lock the doors, draw the armchair closer to the blazing fire and settle down to a spine-chilling read.

With a word of warning to those of nervous a disposition, Wordsworth presents this spellbinding collection of chilling Celtic tales of the macabre, all drawn from the rich and varied literary tradition of a culture long enchanted by things supernatural, 'a land where ghosts and ghost-seers are so common'. Featuring the imaginative writing of such towering masters of the genre as Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Patrick Kennedy, Thomas Crofton Croker and George Moore, this volume of ghoulish masterpieces from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is an encapsulation of the arcane lore, magical landscape and fantastic creativity of the Irish. Don't attempt to read these horrifying tales alone in an empty house. Your blood will run cold as the unreal becomes real and the impossible all too possible. Indelible images will possess your imagination and haunt your dreams. Make sure all the lights are on and the doors are bolted.