Jane Eyre is alone in the world. Disliked by her aunt's family, she is sent away to school. Here she learns that a young girl, with neither money nor family to support her, can expect little from the world. She survives, but she wants more from life than simply to survive: she wants respect, and love. When she goes to work for Mr Rochester, she hopes she has found both at once. But the sound of strange laughter, late at night, behind a locked door, warns her that her troubles are only beginning.

It was just a smooth round metal ball, less than a metre in diameter. Although it was still hot from its journey through the huge nothingness of space, it looked quite harmless. But what was it, exactly? A meteor, perhaps — just one of those pieces of rock from outer space that occasionally fall down on to the planet Earth. But meteors don't usually make strange hissing sounds ...In this collection of four of his famous science-fiction stories, John Wyndham creates visions of the future that make us think carefully about the way we live now.

A pretty young girl has to leave home to make money for her family. She is clever and a good worker; but she is uneducated and does not know the cruel ways of the world. So, when a rich young man says he loves her, she is careful — but not careful enough. He is persuasive, and she is overwhelmed. It is not her fault, but the world says it is. Her young life is already stained by men's desires, and by death.

The woman in white first appears at night on a lonely heath near London and is next seen at a grave-side in Cumberland. Who is she? Where has she come from, and what is her history? She seems alone and friendless, frightened and confused. And it seems she knows a secret — a secret that could bring ruin and shame to a man who will do anything to keep her silent. This famous mystery thriller by Wilkie Collins has excitement, suspense, romance, and a plot that twists and turns on every page.

Countdown to First Certificate bridges the gap between intermediate level and the First Certificate exam. It introduces learners to graded exam format tasks while giving them a strong foundation in vocabulary and grammar. Written and designed to appeal to teenagers.

Countdown to First Certificate bridges the gap between intermediate level and the First Certificate exam. It introduces learners to graded exam format tasks while giving them a strong foundation in vocabulary and grammar. Written and designed to appeal to teenagers.

«'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older — the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.' Anne Elliot seems to have given up on present happiness and has resigned herself to living off her memories. More than seven years earlier she complied with duty: persuaded to view the match as imprudent and improper, she broke off her engagement to a naval captain with neither fortune, ancestry, nor prospects. However, when peacetime arrives and brings the Navy home, and Anne encounters Captain Wentworth once more, she starts to believe in second chances. «Persuasion» celebrates romantic constancy in an era of turbulent change. Written as the Napoleonic Wars were ending, the novel examines how a woman can at once remain faithful to her past and still move forward into the future.»

«Ulysses», one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day, 16 June 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through the streets of Dublin. Each episode has its own literary style, and the epic journey of Odysseus is only one of many correspondencies that add layers of meaning to the text. «Ulysses» has been the subject of controversy since copies of the first English edition were burned by the New York Post Office Authorities. Today critical interest centres on the authority of the text, and this edition, complete with an invaluable Introduction, notes, and appendices, republishes for the first time, without interference, the original 1922 text.»

The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers * a new, modern-spelling text, collated and edited from all existing printings * on-page commentary and notes explain meaning, staging, allusions, and much else * detailed introduction considers composition, sources, performances, and changing critical attitudes to the play * illustrated with production photographs and related art * full index to introduction and commentary * durable sewn binding for lasting use

«Oscar Wilde was already one of the best known literary figures in Britain when he was persuaded to turn his extraordinary talents to the theatre. Between 1891 and 1895 he produced a sequence of distinctive plays which spearheaded the dramatic renaissance of the 1890s and retain their power today. The social comedies, «Lady Windermere's Fan», «A Woman of No Importance», and «An Ideal Husband», offer a moving as well as witty dissection of society and its morals, with a sharp focus on sexual politics. By contrast, the experimental, symbolist Salome, written originally in French, was banned for public performance by the English censor. His final dramatic triumph was his `trivial' comedy for serious people, «The Importance of Being Earnest» arguably the greatest farcical comedy in English. Under the General Editorship of Dr Michael Cordner of the University of York, the texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation. In addition, there is a scholarly introduction and detailed annotation.»

«'The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.' When Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, he is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary, decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton, he wishes to stay forever young, and pledges his very soul to keep his good looks. Set in fin-de-siécle London, the novel traces a path from the studio of painter Basil Hallward to the opium dens of the East End. As Dorian's slide into crime and cruelty progresses he stays magically youthful, while his beautiful portrait changes, revealing the hideous corruption of moral decay. Ever since its first publication in 1890 Wilde's only novel has remained the subject of critical controversy. Acclaimed by some as an instructive moral tale, it has been denounced by others for its implicit immorality. Combining elements of the supernatural, aestheticism, and the Gothic, «The Picture of Dorian Gray» is an unclassifiable and uniquely unsettling work of fiction.»

«In 1872 the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This gave Tolstoy the starting point he needed for composing what many believe to be the greatest novel ever written. In writing «Anna Karenina» he moved away from the vast historical sweep of «War and Peace» to tell, with extraordinary understanding, the story of an aristocratic woman who brings ruin on herself. Anna's tragedy is interwoven with not only the courtship and marriage of Kitty and Levin but also the lives of many other characters. Rich in incident, powerful in characterization, the novel also expresses Tolstoy's own moral vision. `The correct way of putting the question is the artist's duty', Chekhov once insisted, and Anna Karenina was the work he chose to make his point. It solves no problem, but it is deeply satisfying because all the questions are put correctly.»

«'What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?' Ebenezer Scrooge is a bad-tempered skinflint who hates Christmas and all it stands for, but a ghostly visitor foretells three apparitions who will thaw Scrooge's frozen heart. «A Christmas Carol» has gripped the public imagination since it was first published in 1843, and it is now as much a part of Christmas as mistletoe or plum pudding. This edition reprints the story alongside Dickens's four other Christmas Books: «The Chimes», «The Cricket on the Hearth», «The Battle of Life», and «The Haunted Man». All five stories show Dickens at his unpredictable best, jumbling together comedy and melodrama, genial romance and urgent social satire, in pursuit of his aim 'to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land'.»

«Crime and Punishment» is the story of a murder committed on principle, of a killer who wishes by his action to set himself outside and above society. A novel of fearful tension, physical, and psychological, it is pervaded by Dostoevsky's sinister evocation of St Petersburg, yet in the life of its gloomy tenements and drink-shops provides moments of wild humour. «Crime and Punishment» was marked by Dostoevsky's own harrowing experiences. He had himself undergone interrogation and trial, and was condemned to death, a sentence commuted to penal servitude. In prison he was particularly impressed by one hardened murderer who seemed to have attained a spiritual equilibrium beyond good and evil: yet witnessing the misery of other convicts also engendered in Dostoevsky a belief in the Christian idea of salvation through suffering.»

«Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, «The Karamazov Brothers» (1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons — the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha — are all at some level involved. Bound up with this intense family drama is Dostoevsky's exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, the question of human freedom, the collective nature of guilt, the disatrous consequences of rationalism. The novel is also richly comic: the Russian Orthodox Church, the legal system, and even the authors most cherisehd causes and beliefs are presented with a note of irreverence, so that orthodoxy, and radicalism, sanity and madness, love and hatred, right and wrong are no longer mutually exclusive. Rebecca West considered it «the allegory for the world's maturity», but with children to the fore. This new translation does full justice to Doestoevsky's genius, particularly in the use of the spoken word, which ranges over every mode of human expression.»

«Into a compellingly real portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society, Dostoevsky introduces his ideal hero, the saintly Prince Myshkin. The tensions subsequently unleashed by the hero's innocence, truthfulness, and humility betray the inadequacy of his moral idealism and disclose the spiritual emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate him. Myshkin's mission ends in idiocy and darkness, but it is the world that is rotten, not he. Written under appalling personal circumstances when Dostoevsky was travelling in Europe, «The Idiot» not only reveals the author's acute artistic sense and penetrating psychological insight, but also affords his most incisive indictment of Russia's struggling to emulate contemporary Europe and sinking under the weight of Western materialism. This new translation by Alan Myers is meticulously faithful to the original and has a critical introduction by W. J. Leatherbarrow.»

'Tom was a glittering hero once more — the pet of the old, and the envy of the young...There were some that believed he would be President yet, if he escaped hanging.' In this enduring and internationally popular novel, Mark ogaincombines social satire and dime-novel sensation with a rhapsody on boyhood and on America's pre-industrial past. Tom Sawyer is resilient, enterprising, and vainglorious. In a series of adventures along the banks of the Mississippi, he usually manages to come out on top. From petty triumphs over his friends and over his long-suffering Aunt Polly, to his intervention in a murder trial, Tom engages readers of all ages. He has long been a defining figure in the American cultural imagination. Alongside the charm and the excitement, Twain raises serious questions about community, race, and the past. Above all, the book invites discussion of the way in which childhood is invoked to counter the uncomfortable truths of the adult world.

Virginia Woolf's exuberant `biography' tells the story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the sixteenth century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy tribute to the `life' that her love for Vita Sackville-West had breathed into Virginia Woolf's own day-to-day existence; it is also Woolf's light-hearted and light-handed teasing out of the assumptions that lie behind the normal conventions for writing about a fictional or historical life. In this novel, Virginia Woolf plays loose and fast: Orlando uncovers a literary and sexual revolution overnight.

«Porthgenna Tower on the remote western Cornish coast. Moments before her death, Mrs Treverton dictates a secret to her maid, never to be passed to her husband as she had instructed. Fifteen years later, when Mrs Treverton's daughter, Rosamond, returns to Porthgenna with her blind husband, Leonard, she is intrigued by the strange and seemingly disturbed Mrs Jazeph's warning not to enter the Myrtle Room in the ruined north wing. Strong-minded and ingenious, Rosamond's determined detective work uncovers shocking and unsettling truths beyond all expectation. A mystery of unrelenting suspense and psychologically penetrating characters, «The Dead Secret» explores the relationship between a fallen woman, her illegitimate daughter, and buried secrets in a superb blend of romance and Gothic drama. Wilkie Collins's fifth novel, «The Dead Secret» anticipates the themes of his next novel, «The Woman in White» in its treatment of mental illness, disguise and deception, and the dispossession of lost identity. Yet a series of comic figures offsets the tension, from the dyspeptic Mr Phippen to the perpetually smiling governess, Miss Sturch. Displaying the talent and energy which made Collins the most popular novelist of the 1860s, «The Dead Secret» represents a crucial phase in Collins's rise as a mystery writer, and was his first full-length novel written specifically for serialization.»

«On a broad and colourful canvas, extending from urban and rural England to Waterloo and the continental haunts of exiles, Thackeray gives us one of the greatest social-satirical novels in the language-one of the most entertaining and profound, and, in the person of Becky Sharp, we have one of literature's most resourceful, attractive, and amoral characters. Essentially a commentary on hypocrisy and those ethical principles to which society pays lip-service, «Vanity Fair» (1847-8) invites us to consider which is to blame: the opportunist or the society that makes opportunism necessary. This edition, which reproduces the text of the Oxford Thackeray enhanced by John Sutherland's lively introduction and notes, includes all of Thackeray's own illustrations.»