Classics

The Tailor of Gloucester was first published in 1903 and tells the story of a poor tailor trying to survive in his freezing workshop over a hard winter. He has a terribly important commission to complete for the Mayor of Gloucester's wedding on Christmas...

Deliciously humorous and abounding with unforgettably quirky characters, this pitch-perfect collection of short stories takes the reader from the Big Apple to the cattle ranches of Texas and beyond. Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini...

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue. The Professor is Charlotte Brontes first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and consciousness of a man, William Crimsworth. Like Jane Eyre he is parentless; like Lucy Snowe in...

The hero of Charlotte Bronte's first novel escapes a dreary clerkship in industrial Yorkshire by taking a job as a teacher in Belgium. There, however, his entanglement with the sensuous but manipulative Zoraide Reuter, complicates his affections for a...

On the day of his wedding, Conrad, heir to the house of Otranto, is killed in mysterious circumstances. His calculating father Manfred fears that his dynasty will now come to an end and determines to marry his son's bride himself - despite the fact he is...

A masterpiece of European literature that blends family memoir and fictionAn Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Natalia...

A timeless classic, A Christmas Carol has surely kept many children off the naughty list. Ebenezer Scrooge has become an iconic character, one whose story of change will inspire others to act kind towards all. A Christmas Carol is one of Charles...

This postbellum Greek tragedy is the perfect introduction to Faulkner's elaborate descriptive syntax.Quentin Compson and Shreve, his Harvard roommate, are obsessed with the tragic rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. As a poor white boy, Sutpen was turned...

Charting the rise and fall of an ambitious young social climber in a cruel, monarchical society, Stendhal's The Red and the Black is translated with an introduction and notes by Roger Gard in Penguin Classics.Handsome, ambitious Julien Sorel is...

A secret terrorist group infiltrates the household of a government official's son, with a view to spying on the father and, ultimately, assassinating him. But the young man entrusted with the task – an ailing, world-weary “nobody” – seized with the...

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - -between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later...

Arguably the first English novel and still the ultimate castaway narrative, Defoe’s iconic tale of shipwreck and survival retains its exoticism and adventure into the twenty-first century.  The Penguin English Library Edition of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel...

Samuel Richardson's Pamela is a captivating story of one young woman's rebellion against the social order, edited by Peter Sabor with an introduction by Margaret A. Doody in Penguin Classics.Fifteen-year-old Pamela Andrews, alone in the world, is pursued...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne'I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift out of it for my soul; so must be obliged to go on writing like a Dutch...

A key work in the German 'Sturm und Drang' movement, Johann Goethe's autobiographical epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther is a defining moment in early Romanticism, which has influenced writers from Mary Shelley to Thomas Mann. This Penguin...

'I have so much and my feeling for her devours everything, I have so much and without her everything is nothing.'The Sorrows of Young Werther propelled Goethe to instant fame when it first appeared in 1774. Goethe drew on his own unhappy experiences to...

Galdos's four-part Fortunata and Jacinta (1886-7), the masterpiece among his almost 80 novels, tells the turbulent story of two women, their husbands and their lovers, set against the intricate web of dynastic alliances and class contrasts of Madrid in...

Introduction and Notes by Dr Howard J. Booth, University of Kent at Canterbury. 'When you have experienced Sons and Lovers you have lived through the agonies of the young Lawrence striving to win free from his old life'.Richard Aldington This novel is...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence'"She was a brazen hussy.""She wasn't. - And she was pretty, wasn't she?""I didn't look ... And tell your girls, my son, that when they're running after you, they're not to come and...

It is 1913, and Viennese high society is determined to find an appropriate way of celebrating the seventieth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef.But as the aristocracy tries to salvage something illustrious out of the collapse of the...