The Nether World

Author	George Meredith
ISBN	0140430342

Virginia Woolf said of The Egoist: 'Meredith pays us a supreme compliment to which as novel-readers we are little accustomed ... He imagines us capable of disinterested curiosity in the behaviour of our kind.' In this, the most dazzlingly intellectual of all his novels, Meredith tries to illuminate...

Author	Mary Elizabeth Braddon
ISBN	0192835203

whatever could be Lady Audley's secret? could it be... murder? miscegenation? malfeasance? misdirected malevolence ending in tears, tragedy, and general tawdriness? an assumed identity? flatulence? that not-so-fresh feeling? bigamy? bigotry? child abuse? child abandonment? une affaire...

Author	Elizabeth Gaskell
ISBN	0140434224

A very powerfully moving novel of a young woman caught between the attractions of two very different men, Sylvia’s Lovers is set in the 1790s in an English seaside town. England is at war with France, and press-gangs wreak havoc by seizing young men for service. One of their victims is a whaling harpooner...

Author	Matthew Arnold
ISBN	0486280373

This superb selection of the poetry of Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) offers rich evidence of the poetic gifts that made him famous in his day, and that continue to rank him among the most loved and admired of Victorian poets. In addition to the title poem, it includes such masterpieces as "The Scholar...

Author	Maria Edgeworth
ISBN	0192837095

The lively comedy of this novel in which a young woman comes of age amid the distractions and temptations of London high society belies the challenges it poses to the conventions of courtship, the dependence of women, and the limitations of domesticity. Contending with the perils and the varied cast...

Author	George Eliot
ISBN	0375759018

Adam Bede, the first novel written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1859. It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respected scholar of her time.
The story's plot follows four characters' rural lives in the fictional community...

Author	Anthony Trollope
ISBN	0140434100

Written in 1863, near the beginning of his career, Rachel Ray is one of Anthony Trollope's sweetest, tightest, and most charming novels. The eponymous young lady is the daughter of one widow and sister of another. She falls for a handsome young man named Luke Rowan, who is the partner in a local brewery...

Author	Mary Elizabeth Braddon
ISBN	0192837273

Mary Elizabeth Braddon has been having something of a moment recently, on the back of the current interest in Victorian sensation fiction. Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Aurora Floyd (1863), and The Doctor’s Wife (1864) have both recently been republished in critical editions, by Oxford World’s...

Author	Mary Elizabeth Braddon
ISBN	0192833014

When The Doctor's Wife was first published in 1864, Mary Elizabeth Braddon was well known for her scandalous bestseller, Lady Audley's Secret. Adultery, death, and the spectacle of female recrimination and suffering are the elements that combine to make The Doctor's Wife a classic women's 'sensation'...

Author	Mrs. Oliphant
ISBN	0192804111

Hester tells the story of the aging but powerful Catherine Vernon, and her conflict with the young and determined Hester, whose growing attachment to Edward, Catherine's favorite, spells disaster for all concerned.

Catherine Vernon, jilted in her youth, has risen to power in a man's world...

Author	Mrs. Henry Wood
ISBN	0192804626

When the aristocratic Lady Isabel abandons her husband and children for her wicked seducer, more is at stake than moral retribution.

Ellen Wood played upon the anxieties of the Victorian middle classes who feared a breakdown of the social order as divorce became more readily available and...

Author

Antonia Hodgson

London, 1727, and Tom Hawkins is about to fall from his heaven of card games, brothels and coffee-houses into the hell of a debtors' prison.

The Marshalsea is a savage world of its own, with simple rules: those with family or friends who can lend them a little money may survive in relative comfort....