Серия книг «World`s Classics» — 7 книг

Jane Austen began writing in her early teens, and filled three notebooks with her fiction. Her earliest work reflects her interest in the novel as a genre; in brilliant short pieces she plays with plots, stock characters, diction, and style, developing asense of form at a remarkably early age.

The characters of these stories have a jaunty and never-failing devotion to themselves. They perpetually lie, cheat, steal – and occasionally commit murder. Throughout these short or unfinished pieces, Austen exhibits her sense of the preposterous in life and fiction with tough-mindedness and robust humour. In her later published fiction, Austen had learned to take demands for propriety seriously, reining in whatever might be thought boisterous or coarse. Here we see Jane Austen without her inhibitions.

In addition to prose fiction and prayers, this collection also contains many of Jane Austen`s poems, written to amuse or console friends, and rarely reprinted. Texts throughout are based on manuscripts, including the three notebooks, affording a distinct edition with a number of new readings.

Jane Austen began writing in her early teens, and filled three notebooks with her fiction. Her earliest work reflects her interest in the novel as a genre; in brilliant short…

In Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot turned to contemporary English and European life as material for the expression of her own idealism.
Set against a period of emergent nationalism, Daniel Deronda probes the egoism of a spoiled girl and her increasing awareness of conscience through suffering. Gwendolen comes to regard Daniel as her moral and spiritual mentor, but chance, the revelation of his Jewish birth, and his practical and sympathetic identification with his race draw him away from her.
Daniel Deronda is a psychologically incisive investigation, full of George Eliot`s wisdom about human nature and penetrating in its analysis of motive and decision. Its concerns are of its own time and for all time: its emotional and intellectual content is moving, challenging, and disturbing.

In Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot turned to contemporary English and European life as material for the expression of her own idealism.
Set against a period of emergent…

The introduction reviews the few known facts about this early Shakespeare play and discusses the puzzling problems of its date and authorship. The text has been freshly edited with the aim of presenting the play as revised for the first recorded performance in 1594, with the addition of stage business from the prompt-copy from which the Folio edition derives.

The introduction reviews the few known facts about this early Shakespeare play and discusses the puzzling problems of its date and authorship. The text has been freshly edited…

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) remains one of the best loved of the great English poets.
Hardy thought of himself as a poet all his life, although his poetic career only flowered after he had retired from novel-writing in his mid-fifties. Over the next thirty years he wrote the poems that have established him as one of the great and most enduringly popular English poets of the twentieth century.
His verse touches all the common themes of human existence: birth, childhood, love, marriage, ageing, death. If Hardy`s age brings anything to them, it is an old man`s ironic and elegiac sense that in life hopes are likely to be defeated and losses sustained, and that the world was not designed for human happiness.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) remains one of the best loved of the great English poets.
Hardy thought of himself as a poet all his life, although his poetic career only flowered after…

Mrs Gaskell`s second full-length novel, it deals explicitly with the
issue of unmarried motherhood. Two of her male acquaintances
even went so far as to burn their copies.
Ruth Hilton, an orphan and dressmaker`s assistant, is seduced and
heartlessly deserted by the wealthy Henry Bellingham. Mrs
Gaskell tells the story of Ruth`s love for her child; her new life in
the home of Thurston Benson, a dissenting minister; the misery
caused by the tyrannical Mr Bradshaw, in whose house she finds
employment as a governess; and the cruel twist of fate that
confronts her again with her worthless lover, with
appalling consequences.
Ruth was in its own time a cause celebre, which contributed
substantially to its author`s growing reputation. Its heroine`s
betrayal and redemption are treated with the compassionate
insight that typifies Mrs Gaskell`s handling of social issues, while
the provincial setting is described with the precision of
observation that we associate with her fiction at its best.
The text for this edition is based upon that of the first edition, published in three volumes in 1853.

Mrs Gaskell`s second full-length novel, it deals explicitly with the
issue of unmarried motherhood. Two of her male acquaintances
even went so far as to burn their copies.
Ruth…

In `The Tenant of Wild fell Hall` Anne Bronte wished to `tell the truth, for the truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it`.
Anne Bronte`s second novel seemed to many contemporary readers shockingly unlike her first, `Agnes Grey`, published in the previous year. There, Charlotte Bronte had admired her sister`s `quiet description and simple pathos`, but she was disturbed by `The Tenant of Wildfell Hall`, which reminded reviewers of `Wuthering Heights`: it was, in spiteof its `excellent moral`, `coarse, not to say brutal`. For Anne`s heroine, Helen Huntingdon, having endured too many of the `revolting scenes` deplored by reviewers, leaves her dissolute husband in order to earn her own living and rescue her son from hisinfluence.
A passionate and courageous challenge to the conventions supposedly upheld by Victorian society and reflected in circulating-library fiction, `The Tenant of Wildfell Hall` is compelling in its imaginative power, in the bold naturalism of its central scenes, the realism and range of its dialogue, and in its psychological insight into the characters involved in the marital battle.

In `The Tenant of Wild fell Hall` Anne Bronte wished to `tell the truth, for the truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it`.
Anne Bronte`s second…

He Knew He Was Right is widely regarded as one of Trollope`s masterpieces, displaying the full range of his mature art by turns humorous, pathetic, tragic, and socially aware.
Louis Trevelyan seems the most fortunate of mid-Victorian gentlemen: young, rich, well-educated, handsome, and with a beautiful wife. But his life is ruined by ungrounded jealousy. In the later mad scenes, in which the unlucky hero has been utterly consumed by an obsession with his wife`s imaginary infidelity, Trollope`s writing reaches a Shakespearian pitch unmatched anywhere else in his vast fictional corpus. In the sub-plot dealing with the marriages of his English and American heroines, Trollope engages head-on the issue of women`s rights, a topic which was as alive for his contemporaries of the late 1860s as it is today. And in the person of Miss Jemima Stanbury, the virtuous dragon of Exeter Cathedral Close, Trollope created one of his most notable comic characters.

He Knew He Was Right is widely regarded as one of Trollope`s masterpieces, displaying the full range of his mature art by turns humorous, pathetic, tragic, and socially aware.…