Wordsworth

A Room of One's Own (1929) has become a classic feminist essay and perhaps Virginia Woolf's best known work; The Voyage Out (1915) is highly significant as her first novel. Both focus on the place of women within the power structures of modern society. The essay lays bare the woman artist's struggle for a voice, since throughout history she has been denied the social and economic independence assumed by men. Woolf's prescription is clear: if a woman is to find creative expression equal to a man's, she must have an independent income, and a room of her own. This is both an acute analysis and a spirited rallying cry; it remains surprisingly resonant and relevant in the 21st century. The novel explores these issues more personally, through the character of Rachel Vinrace, a young woman whose 'voyage out' to South America opens up powerful encounters with her fellow-travellers, men and women. As she begins to understand her place in the world, she finds the happiness of love, but also sees its brute power. Woolf has a sharp eye for the comedy of English manners in a foreign milieu; but the final undertow of the novel is tragic as, in some of her finest writing, she calls up the essential isolation of the human spirit.

Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day (1919), portrays the gradual changes in a society, the patterns and conventions of which are slowly disintegrating; where the representatives of the younger generation struggle to forge their own way, for '... life has to be faced: to be rejected; then accepted on new terms with rapture'. Woolf begins to experiment with the novel form while demonstrating her affection for the literature of the past. Jacob's Room (1922), Woolf's third novel, marks the bold affirmation of her own voice and search for a new form to express her view that 'the human sou... orientates itself afresh every now & then. It is doing so now. No one can see it whole therefore.' Jacob's life is presented in subtle, delicate and tantalising glimpses, the novel's gaps and silences are as replete with meaning as the wicker armchair creaking in the empty room.

This volume brings together two series of short fiction by the poet, writer and religious philosopher Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). It includes the first complete publication of Simple Simon, the detective series featuring Crowley's most memorable fictional creation, the mystic-magician-philosopher-psychoanalyst-detective Simon Iff. The idealised Crowley in old age, Simon Iff is wise, knowing and unfailingly humorous as he applied psychoanalysis, Taoism and his own religious philosophy of Thelema to divine the depths of human nature and solve a wide array of crimes and mysteries. The six Scrutinies of Simon Iff stories are set in France and England, anchored by Iff's beloved Hemlock Club. The twelve Simon Iff in America stories afford Crowley's penetrating insights into America as he found it during his residence from 1914 to 1919. His three Simon Iff Abroad stories take the reader to tribal North Africa, inaccessible Central Africa and to the high seas. The two Simon Iff Psychoanalyst stories were among the earliest tales to use the new science of psychoanalysis to solve mysteries. Also included is Crowley's other major short fiction series, the eight stories of his legendary Golden Twigs, which were inspired by Sir J.G. Frazer's encyclopedic study of myth and religion in history, The Golden Bough.

This volume brings together Virginia Woolf's last two novels, The Years (1937) which traces the lives of members of a dispersed middle-class family between 1880 and 1937, and Between the Acts (1941), an account of a village pageant in the summer preceding the Second World War which successfully interweaves comedy, satire and disturbing observation. Rewriting the traditional family saga and the pageant, these unsettling novels provide extraordinary critiques of Englishness and English identity while pursuing compelling existentialist and psychological themes such as the nature of time, memory, personal relationships and sexual desire. Their tightly constructed narratives enable the reader to experience the fragmented lives of their characters and the difficulties that they have in communicating with each other and even understanding themselves. Read together, these novels illuminate each other in ways that will engage both the student and the general reader.

Enter Arsene Lupin, Gentleman — Cambrioleur, the 'Prince of Thieves', one of the most daring and dashing individuals who ever lifted a diamond necklace from under the noses of the authorities. Young and handsome, laughing his way through difficulties and danger, Lupin is also the master of disguise and languages. His sense of humour and conceit make life difficult for the police who attribute most of the major crimes in France to Lupin and his gang of ruffians and urchins. Maurice Leblanc's stories are lively and witty, occasionally taking on the air of burlesque, especially when Lupin pits his wits against the English detective named variously 'Holmlock Shears' and 'Herlock Sholmes' These are significant tales in the history of crime fiction but, more importantly, they are great fun.

'We shall have no other course to pursue but to fulfil our promise. You will die at Eight in the Evening — The Four Just Men' Criminals and malefactors beware! There is no escape from the sword of justice wielded by The Four Just Men. Here are the complete adventures of Edgar Wallace's daring and ingenious vigilantes. This fascinating bumper collection contains all six volumes of the Just Men saga: The Four Just Men, The Council of Justice, The Just Men of Cordova, The Law of The Four Just Men, The Three Just Men and Again the Three. In these thrilling yarns of daring do, mystery and international intrigue, the Just Men tackle wrongdoers of all kinds from criminal masterminds and desperate anarchists to cunning murderers and obsessive madmen. Where Scotland Yard fails — they succeed. With a finely blended mixture of suspense, humour and action Edgar Wallace concocts a fantastic and unmissable series of page-turning adventures.

When Uncle Henry and Aunt Em's grey, grim Kansas farmhouse was picked up by the great summer cyclone, a wondrous adventure had begun. The whole house whirled around two or three times then rose slowly through the air with little Dorothy and dog Toto inside. After what seemed an age to Dorothy the house landed with a great crash and upon opening the door she and Toto were amazed to see a beautiful brilliant green land full of sunshine and flowers. It is not long before she and Toto meet the motley crew — Scarecrow, Lion and Tin Woodman — who are to become her travelling companions along the Yellow Brick Road which leads to the Emerald City and the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Dorothy and Toto have many adventures before the Good Witch grants them their wish — to return home to Kansas. But that is just the beginning; many more adventures lie ahead, with the weirdest folk to meet and the most fantastical places to explore — all in the Land of Oz.

An invaluable companion to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's inimitable portrait of 'the great Father of Waters'. Part memoir, part travelogue, it expresses the full range of Twain's literary personality, and remains the most vivid, boisterous and provocative account of the cultural and societal history of the Mississippi Valley, from 'the golden age' of steamboating to the violence wrought by the Civil War. This new edition of Life on the Mississippi contains a comprehensive introduction, extensive annotations and a guide to further reading designed to appeal to both the student and the general reader.

Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel depicts nothing less than the great clashes between capital and labour, which arose from rapid industrialisation and problems of trade in the mid-nineteenth century. But these clashes are dramatized through personal struggles. John Barton has to reconcile his personal conscience with his socialist duty, risking his life and liberty in the process. His daughter Mary is caught between two lovers, from opposing classes — worker and manufacturer. And at the heart of the narrative lies a murder which implicates them all. Mary Barton was published in 1848, at a time of great social ferment in Europe, and it reflects its revolutionary moment through an English lens. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first novel about the world in which she lived — Manchester at the height of the industrial revolution. As the wife of a Unitarian minister she was solidly middle-class; but she also had close contact with the working classes around her, sympathised with them, and represented their extreme distresses in her fiction. She is radical in taking on their dialect, imagining the realities of their lives, and placing a working woman at the centre of her fiction. If to our eyes her vision remains limited, it was an honest vision, for which she was much criticised in her own time, by her own class.

Contains: A Room of One's Own, To the Lighthouse, Between the Acts, Three Guineas, Mrs Dalloway, Jacob's Room, The Waves, The Years, Orlando. Mrs Dalloway, the society hostess Clarissa, is giving a party and her thoughts on that one day, and the interior monologues of others with interwoven lives reveal the characters of the central protagonists. To the Lighthouse is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. Based on her early experiences, it touches on childhood and children's perceptions and desires. It is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War. Virginia Woolf's Orlando, 'the longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. 'I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot', said Woolf of The Waves. Regarded as one of her greatest and most original works, it conveys the rhythms of life in synchrony with the cycle of nature and the passage of time. In these, as in A Room of One's Own, Between the Acts, Three Guineas, The Years and Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf displays her genuine humanity and concern for the experiences that enrich and stultify existence. Her delicate artistry and lyrical prose have established her as a writer of sensitivity and profound talent.

'And behind him, like a misshapen black frog, bounded the Thing, its red tongue lolling out of its gash of a mouth, its diminutive blubbery lips drawn back in a murderous snarl'. Let Henry S. Whitehead take you into the mysterious and macabre world of voodoo where beasts invade the mind of man and where lives of the living are racked by the spirits of the dead. In this collection of rare and out of print stories you will encounter the curses of the great Guinea-Snake, the Sheen, the weredog whose very touch means certain death, the curious tale of the 'magicked' mirror, and fiendish manikins who make life a living hell. Included in this festival of shivering fear is the remarkable narrative 'Williamson' which every editor who read the story shied away from publishing. With deceptive simplicity and chilling realism, Whitehead's Voodoo Tales are amongst the most frightening ever written.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was one of the brightest stars of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was his most important book. First published in London in March 1776, it had been eagerly anticipated by Smith's contemporaries and became an immediate bestseller. That edition sold out quickly and others followed. Today, Smith's Wealth of Nations rightfully claims a place in the Western intellectual canon. It is the first book of modern political economy, and still provides the foundation for the study of that discipline. But it is much more than that. Along with important discussions of economics and political theory, Smith mixed plain common sense with large measures of history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and much else. Few texts remind us so clearly that the Enlightenment was very much a lived experience, a concern with improving the human condition in practical ways for real people. A masterpiece by any measure, Wealth of Nations remains a classic of world literature to be usefully enjoyed by readers today.

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the greatest novels ever written, did not emerge from a vacuum. They were preceded by at least twenty prose works of different kinds, some of them masterpieces in their own right. These stories may be viewed as a fascinating encounter with literary predecessors such as Rousseau and Pushkin, and they are never far removed from autobiography, but in them Tolstoy can be seen forging a strong, new cultural personality. Their virtues lie in local colour, brilliant characterization and dialogue, along with strong narrative interest linked to important ideas and meanings, most of which will re-emerge in the later works. This undervalued area of a great man's writing deserves closer attention, and will reward the reader with unforgettable individuals, issues and situations. In The Cossacks, for example, Tolstoy succeeds in combining a realistic description of the Caucasus with his hero's personal vision of the locality. Nor is this success the only one in this remarkable period. Reading these early stories gives a penetrating insight into the workshop of a towering literary genius.

Sigmund Freud's controversial ideas have penetrated Western culture more deeply than those of any other psychologist. But psychoanalysis was never just a method of treatment, rather a vision of the human condition which has continued to fascinate and provoke long after the death of its originator.

During his life, Geoffrey Chaucer (born c.1340) was courtier, diplomat, revenue collector, administrator, negotiator, overseer of building projects, landowner and knight of the shire. He was servant, retainer, husband, friend and father, but is now mainly known as a poet and 'the father of English literature', a postion to which he was raised by other writers in the generation after his death. It was Boccaccio's Decameron which inspired Chaucer, in the 1390s, to begin work on The Canterbury Tales, which was still unfinished at his death in October 1400. It tells the story of a group of 30 pilgrims who meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames opposite the city of London, and travel together to visit the then famous shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury cathedral. The tavern host, who accompanies them, suggests that they amuse one another along the way by telling stories, with the best storyteller awarded a meal in the tavern (paid for by all the others) on their return. The stories told by the pilgrims range from bawdy comedies through saints' lives and moral tracts to courtly romances, always delivered with a generous helping of Chaucer's own sly wit and ironic humour. Although basing his characters on the stereotypes of 'estates satire', Chaucer succeeds in his aim of producing an overview of his times and their culture, for posterity, in the manner of Italian, proto-Renaissance, writers. This transcription and edition is taken from British Library MS Harley 7334, produced within ten years of Chaucer's death. The on-page notes and glosses aim to enable readers with little or no previous experience of medieva

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a classic representation of the impoverished and politically powerless underclass of British society in Edwardian England, ruthlessly exploited by the institutionalized corruption of their employers and the civic and religious authorities. Epic in scale, the novel charts the ruinous effects of the laissez-faire mercantilist ethics on the men, women, and children of the working classes, and through its emblematic characters, argues for a socialist politics as the only hope for a civilized and humane life for all. It is a timeless work whose political message is as relevant today as it was in Tressell's time. For this it has long been honoured by the Trade Union movement and thinkers across the political spectrum.

'His body was pressed against the wall at the head of the bed, and the face was a mask of agonised horror and fruitless entreaty. But the eyes were already glazed in death, and before Francis could reach the bed the body had toppled over and lay inert and lifeless. Even as he looked, he heard a limping step go down the passage outside'. E. F. Benson was a master of the ghost story and now all his rich, imaginative, spine-tingling and beautifully written tales are presented together in this bumper collection. The range and variety of these spooky narratives is far broader and more adventurous than those of any other writer of supernatural fiction. Within the covers of this volume you will encounter revengeful spectres, vampires, homicidal spirits, monstrous spectral worms and slugs and other entities of nameless dread. This is a classic collection that cannot fail to charm and chill.

This collection comprises of Joyce's three novels, plus the short story collection Dubliners. Dubliners, about Joyce's native city, is faithful to his country, seeing it unflinchingly and challenging every precedent and piety in Irish literature. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, struggling musicians, poets, patriots, and many more simply striving to get by. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man falls between the realism of Dubliners and the symbolism of Ulysses. The novel is a highly autobiographical account of the youth of Stephen Dedalus, who comes to realize that before he can become a true artist, he must rid himself of the stultifying effects of the religion, politics and essential bigotry of his life in late 19th century Ireland. Written with a light touch, it is perhaps the most accessible of Joyce's works. Ulysses is James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece. Scandalously frank, it tells of the events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during which Bloom's voluptuous wife, Molly, commits adultery. Initially deemed obscene in England and the USA, this richly-allusive novel, revolutionary in its modernistic experimentalism, was hailed as a work of genius by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. Finnegans Wake is the book of Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle and their family — their book, but in a curious way the book of us all as well as all our books. Joyce's last great work, it is not comprised of many borrowed styles, like Ulysses, but, rather, formulated as one dense, tongue-twisting soundscape. It also remains the most hilarious, 'obscene', book of innuendos ever to be imagined.

This title includes an Introduction and Notes by John Lester, formerly Head of English at Havering College of Further and Higher Education. From the rain forests of Almayer's Folly to the Mediterranean coast of «The Rover», Conrad's first and final completed novels are played out against contrasting backgrounds. Almayer, in Borneo, is hopelessly obsessed by his deluded dreams for himself and his daughter, which take no account of her falling in love with a handsome Balinese prince. Peyrol, the rover, returns to a France at war and finds the actions of those around him still overborne by memories of revolutionary terror. For the orphaned Lieutenant Real and Arlette love offers release but their romance seems doomed by the demands of his naval duties. Conrad's acute understanding of human psychology and its application across racial and ideological divides is the life-force of both stories. Publication date: 15 July 2011.

This title features collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Few American novelists of the twentieth century have stayed as modern as F. Scott Fitzgerald. He gave a name to his age, 'the Jazz Age', but his reputation has outlived it. Gathered here are the five novels he wrote in his relatively short career, together with a number of the many short stories he wrote between 1922 and his death in 1940. «This Side of Paradise» catapulted him to fame, its expose of the manners and morals of a post-war generation becoming a cause celebre. «The Beautiful and Damned», a semi-autobiographical moral parable of a doomed marriage, affirmed Fitzgerald's status as the spokesman for the generation of the 1920s. His third novel, «The Great Gatsby», remains for many readers the definitive American novel of the twentieth century, its eponymous hero a complex fictional portrayal of a romantic imagination at the mercy of a corrupt reality. «Tender is the Night» is an American Vanity Fair set on the French Riviera in the 1920s. Fitzgerald was working on «The Last Tycoon» at his death in 1940, and many critics rank his account of Hollywood at the height of the studio system, even in its unfinished state, as comparable to the achievement of «The Great Gatsby».

A close friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald (he died in a car crash the day after Fitzgerald's death), Nathanael West wrote two classic American novels; The Day of the Locust is a stark portrayal of Hollywood in the 1930s and Miss Lonelyhearts a story set in New York in the Depression. Also included is 'A Cool Million', and his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, which he conceived while in college.

Selected and Introduced by David Stuart Davies. Prepare to take a step beyond reality into the fantastic realm of other worlds imagined by the pioneers of science fiction. This collection features a set of wide ranging and mind expanding tales created by the founding fathers of this most fascinating and exciting of literary genres. As well as the works of famous authors such as Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jack London, there are some startlingly original gems by lesser known scribes. Thrill to the adventures of the first invisible man in Edward Page Mitchell's The Crystal Man; take part in Stanley G. Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey; travel back in time to the prehistoric world of Atlantis in J. Leslie Mitchell's Three Go Back; be intrigued by Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland, the classic novella of the Fourth Dimension; witness the terrible disaster that besets London in Fred M. White's The Dust of Death; and be chilled by Robert Duncan Milne's cosmic disaster story Into the Sun. From the wonders of outer space, to the predictions of the future and the startling possibilities and dangers of scientific progress to the frightening potentials of human development, the writers of these pioneering scenarios provide thrilling and unique experiences for all those who love to journey beyond the familiar.

This title is selected by Rosemary Gray. When you think of Irish writers of supernatural tales, then the names Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker will figure prominently, but this does no more than scratch the surface of a rich vein of chilling and macabre fiction to be found on the Emerald Isle. This rich and diverse selection showcases some of the very best.

This title includes an Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury. «Tender is the Night» is a story set in the hedonistic high society of Europe during the 'Roaring Twenties'. A wealthy schizophrenic, Nicole Warren, falls in love with Dick Diver — her psychiatrist. The resulting saga of the Divers' troubled marriage, and their circle of friends, includes a cast of aristocratic and beautiful people, unhappy love affairs, a duel, incest, and the problems inherent in the possession of great wealth. Despite cataloguing a maelstrom of interpersonal conflict, «Tender is the Night» has a poignancy and warmth that springs from the quality of Fitzgerald's writing and the tragic personal experiences on which the novel is based. Six years separate «Tender is the Night» and «The Last Tycoon», the novel Fitzgerald left unfinished at his death in December 1940. Fitzgerald lived in Hollywood more or less continuously from July 1937 until his death, and a novel about the film industry at the height of 'the studio system' centred on the working life of a top producer was begun in 1939. Even in its incomplete state «The Last Tycoon» remains the greatest American novel about Hollywood and contains some of Fitzgerald's most brilliant writing.