Серия книг «Everyman Classics» — 436 книг

No novel in English has given more pleasure than Pride and Prejudice. Because it is one of the great works in our literature, critics in every generation reexamine and reinterpret it. But the rest of us simply fall in love with it—and with its wonderfully charming and intelligent heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. And everyone is held fast not only by the novel’s romantic suspense but also by the fascinations of the world we visit. The life of the English country gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century is made as real to us as our own, not only by the author’s wit and feeling but by her subtle observation of the way people behave in society and how we are true or treacherous to each other and to ourselves.

No novel in English has given more pleasure than Pride and Prejudice. Because it is one of the great works in our literature, critics in every generation reexamine and reinterpret…

The title of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors of the story. The narrative centres on the all-encompassing, passionate, but ultimately doomed love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and the people around them.

Virginia Woolf said of Emily Brontë that her writing could “make the wind blow and the thunder roar,” and so it does in Wuthering Heights. Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, and the windswept moors that are the setting of their mythic love are as immediately stirring to the reader of today as they have been for every generation of readers since the novel was first published in 1847. With an introduction by Katherine Frank.

The title of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors of the story. The narrative centres on the all-encompassing, passionate, but ultimately doomed love between…

The first great novel – and perhaps still the most influential – Don Quixote contains within it all the seeds of modern fiction. A fantastic compound of reality and illusion in which the besotted Don Quixote and his down-to-earth companion, the faithful Sancho Panza, set out to right the world’s wrongs in knightly combat, the narrative moves from philosophical speculation to broad comedy, taking in pastoral, farce and fantasy on the way. Between the Don’s dreams of chivalry which inaugurate the novel, and his death which concludes it, Cervantes explores a range of experience and feeling worthy of his great contemporary, Shakespeare.

The first great novel – and perhaps still the most influential – Don Quixote contains within it all the seeds of modern fiction. A fantastic compound of reality and illusion in…

In these three sea stories, based on his own experience, Conrad invests his portraits of mundane steamers and their crews with epic qualities of fortitude and courage in the face of overwhelming natural odds. At the same time, he probes the psychological condition of men together and under pressure with the greatest delicacy, raising the adventure story to the level of high art. The supreme poet of the sailor’s life, Conrad here establishes his reputation as a master storyteller.

In these three sea stories, based on his own experience, Conrad invests his portraits of mundane steamers and their crews with epic qualities of fortitude and courage in the face…

Donne created new forms of lyric, satire, elegiac and religious verse, and his independence of view, compact manner of expression encompassing conflicting moods, impassioned paradox, outbreaks of cynicism and wry humour make his work particularly appealing to the twentieth-century mind. His poetry reflects every stage of his development from the piratical Jack Donne who sailed with Ralegh against the Spaniards and spent riotous nights in the London streets, to the penitent John Donne who became Dean of St Paul’s and the most celebrated preacher of his age.

This edition, compiled and introduced by C. A. Patrides, is recognized as the most complete and scholarly one-volume collection of Donne’s Complete English Poems available.

Donne created new forms of lyric, satire, elegiac and religious verse, and his independence of view, compact manner of expression encompassing conflicting moods, impassioned…

One of the most accomplished and prominent novels of the Victorian era, Middlemarch is an unsurpassed portrait of nineteenth-century English provincial life. Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces resistance from the society she inhabits. In this epic in a small landscape, Eliot’s large cast of precisely delineated characters and the rich tapestry of their stories result in a wise, compassionate, and astute vision of human nature. As Virginia Woolf declared, George Eliot “was one of the first English novelists to discover that men and women think as well as feel, and the discovery was of great artistic moment.”

One of the most accomplished and prominent novels of the Victorian era, Middlemarch is an unsurpassed portrait of nineteenth-century English provincial life. Dorothea Brooke is a…

This bawdy, high-spirited novel—whose author, Laurence Sterne, was described by Diderot as “the Rabelais of the English”—provoked a literary scandal when its first two volumes were published in 1759. A masterpiece of narrative absurdity, ribald humor, and philosophical playfulness, Tristram Shandy is famously studded with witty metafictional gambits—chapters out of order, blank and blacked-out pages, a preface that occurs in the middle of the book—that prefigured postmodernism by two centuries.

Tristram Shandy, the hero of this fictional autobiography, purports to narrate the story of his life, but along the way he engages in so many colorful digressions and exuberant jokes that his birth does not even occur until Volume III. In the meantime, we meet an unforgettable supporting cast of characters—including Shandy’s father and mother, his uncle Toby, the servant Trim, Dr. Slop, and Parson Yorick—whose whimsical obsessions, domestic conflicts, and disastrous mishaps form the fabric of this genre-defying tour de force. With its lively exploration of both the logical limitations and the wildest possibilities of fiction, Tristram Shandy has earned its reputation as one of the greatest comic novels in English literature.

This bawdy, high-spirited novel—whose author, Laurence Sterne, was described by Diderot as “the Rabelais of the English”—provoked a literary scandal when its first two volumes…

The complex story of a notorious law-suit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of 19th-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the corruption of the legal system and the society which supports it.

“Jarndyce and Jarndyce” is an infamous lawsuit that has been in process for generations. Nobody can remember exactly how the case started but many different individuals have found their fortunes caught up in it. Esther Summerson watches as her friends and neighbours are consumed by their hopes and disappointments with the proceedings. But while the intricate puzzles of the lawsuit are being debated by lawyers, other more dramatic mysteries are unfolding that involve heartbreak, lost children, blackmail and murder.

The fog and cold that permeate Bleak House mirror a Victorian England mired in spiritual insolvency. Dickens brought all his passion, brilliance, and narrative verve to this huge novel of lives entangled in a multi-generational lawsuit—and through it, he achieved, at age 41, a stature almost Shakespearean.

The complex story of a notorious law-suit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of 19th-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into…

In his first and still most widely read novel, James Joyce makes a strange peace with the traditional narrative of a young man’s self-discovery by respecting its substance while exploding its form, thereby inaugurating a literary revolution.

Published in 1916 when Joyce was already at work on Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is exactly what its title says and much more. In an exuberantly inventive masterpiece of subjectivity, Joyce portrays his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, growing up in Dublin and struggling through religious and sexual guilt toward an aesthetic awakening. In part a vivid picture of Joyce’s own youthful evolution into one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, it is also a moment in the intellectual history of an age.

In his first and still most widely read novel, James Joyce makes a strange peace with the traditional narrative of a young man’s self-discovery by respecting its substance while…

Jane Eyre, a penniless orphan, is engaged as governess at Thornfield Hall by the mysterious Mr Rochester. Her integrity and independence are tested to the limit as their love for each other grows, and the secrets of Mr Rochester’s past are revealed.

Charlotte Brontë’s novel about the passionate love between Jane Eyre, a young girl alone in the world, and the rich, brilliant, domineering Rochester has, ever since its publication in 1847, enthralled every kind of reader, from the most critical and cultivated to the youngest and most unabashedly romantic. It lives as one of the great triumphs of storytelling and as a moving affirmation of the prerogatives of the heart in the face of disappointment and misfortune.

Jane Eyre has enjoyed huge popularity since first publication, and its success owes much to its exceptional emotional power.

Jane Eyre, a penniless orphan, is engaged as governess at Thornfield Hall by the mysterious Mr Rochester. Her integrity and independence are tested to the limit as their love for…

Published in 1776, in the same year as the Declaration of Independence, The Wealth of Nations has had an equally great impact on the course of modern history. Adam Smith’s celebrated defense of free market economies was written with such expressive power and clarity that the first edition sold out in six months. While its most remarkable and enduring innovation was to see the whole of economic life as a unified system, it is notable also as one of the Enlightenment’s most eloquent testaments to the sanctity of the individual in his relation to the state.

Published in 1776, in the same year as the Declaration of Independence, The Wealth of Nations has had an equally great impact on the course of modern history. Adam Smith’s…

A panoramic satire of English society during the Napoleonic Wars, Vanity Fair is William Makepeace Thackeray’s masterpiece. At its center is one of the most unforgettable characters in nineteenth-century literature: the enthralling Becky Sharp, a charmingly ruthless social climber who is determined to leave behind her humble origins, no matter the cost. Her more gentle friend Amelia, by contrast, only cares for Captain George Osborne, despite his selfishness and her family’s disapproval. As both women move within the flamboyant milieu of Regency England, the political turmoil of the era is matched by the scheming Becky’s sensational rise—and its unforeseen aftermath.

Based in part upon Thackeray’s own love for the wife of a friend, Vanity Fair portrays the hypocrisy and corruption of high society and the dangers of unrestrained ambition with epic brilliance and scathing wit. With an introduction by Catherine Peters.

A panoramic satire of English society during the Napoleonic Wars, Vanity Fair is William Makepeace Thackeray’s masterpiece. At its center is one of the most unforgettable…

Leo Tolstoy’s earliest published work, the trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, was written when he was in his twenties, offering a tantalizing first glimpse of the literary talents that would come to fruition in his later masterpieces.

Chronicling the experiences of a wealthy landowner’s son as he grows up and becomes aware of the world and his place in it, these three short novels were only loosely inspired by Tolstoy’s own memories. In old age he condemned the work as “an awkward mixture of fact and fiction,” but the imaginative powers that enabled him to capture so vividly the universal emotions and sensations of childhood have enthralled generations of readers. We are blessed to have, alongside the mature writer of Anna Karenina and War and Peace and the revolutionary mystic of the later years, the young Tolstoy who wrote these elegiac tales. In their sensitivity to nature and their evocations of fugitive feelings, they reveal his genius in all its untroubled early splendor.

Leo Tolstoy’s earliest published work, the trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, was written when he was in his twenties, offering a tantalizing first glimpse of the literary…

When John Bold decides to challenge corruption in the Church of England he sets the whole town of Barchester by the ears with consequences both comic and sad. Trollope’s first masterpiece is the study of conflicting loyalties and principles in a cathedral city where the gentle warden becomes an unwilling focus of national controversy. The resulting story is both a fine comedy of manners and a magnificent group portrait. THE WARDEN is the first novel of the Barsetshire series.

When John Bold decides to challenge corruption in the Church of England he sets the whole town of Barchester by the ears with consequences both comic and sad. Trollope’s first…

A hypnotic story of hatred, revenge and catastrophe, in which Cousin Bette exacts a terrible price from the rich relations who use and humiliate her. This brilliant picture of post-Napoleonic France, where commercial greed and sexual debauchery are rampant among a demoralized ruling class, speaks as clearly to our age as to the time in which it was written.

A hypnotic story of hatred, revenge and catastrophe, in which Cousin Bette exacts a terrible price from the rich relations who use and humiliate her. This brilliant picture of…

Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has long been celebrated as the first great English novel. Based on the account of a shipwrecked sailor, this early example of ‘faction’ tells the story of one man rediscovering himself and the world in a solitude he thinks complete until his encounter with Man Friday.

Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has long been celebrated as the first great English novel. Based on the account of a shipwrecked sailor, this early example of ‘faction’ tells…

Turgenev’s most celebrated story examines the conflict of generations and attitudes in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, as distant pre-echoes of the revolution rumble through the rural landscape. This is a novel of ideas, but ideas brought vividly to life through the members of the Kirsanov family and their strange new friend, the Nihilist Bazarov.

Turgenev’s most celebrated story examines the conflict of generations and attitudes in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, as distant pre-echoes of the revolution rumble through the…

Wilkie Collins’s classic thriller took the world by storm on its first appearance in 1859, with everything from dances to perfumes to dresses named in honor of the “woman in white.” The novel’s continuing fascination stems in part from a distinctive blend of melodrama, comedy, and realism; and in part from the power of its story.

The catalyst for the mystery is Walter Hartright’s encounter on a moonlit road with a mysterious woman dressed head to toe in white. She is in a state of confusion and distress, and when Hartright helps her find her way back to London she warns him against an unnamed “man of rank and title.” Hartright soon learns that she may have escaped from an asylum and finds to his amazement that her story may be connected to that of the woman he secretly loves. Collins brilliantly uses the device of multiple narrators to weave a story in which no one can be trusted, and he also famously creates, in the figure of Count Fosco, the prototype of the suave, sophisticated evil genius. The Woman in White is still passed as a masterpiece of narrative drive and excruciating suspense.

Wilkie Collins’s classic thriller took the world by storm on its first appearance in 1859, with everything from dances to perfumes to dresses named in honor of the “woman in…

Scott Fitzgerald was called the laureate of the Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby (1926) is a cynical celebration of the post-Great War Long Island/ New York world of get-rich-quick. The narrator, Nick Carraway, sympathetically records the pathos of Gatsby’s romantic dream which founders on the reality of corruption, the insulated selfishness of Tom and Daisy, and the cutting edge of violence. ‘His style sings of hope, his message is despair’, wrote Cyril Connolly. It is terse, spare, lucid, imperishable, a novel of compassion, wry wisdom and narrative verve.

Scott Fitzgerald was called the laureate of the Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby (1926) is a cynical celebration of the post-Great War Long Island/ New York world of get-rich-quick. The…

When John Dowell and his wife befriend Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, they appear to be the perfect couple. He is a distinguished soldier and she is beautiful and intelligent. However, what lies beneath the surface of their marriage is far more sinister and their influence leads John into a tragic drama that threatens to destroy everything he cares about.

Ford Madox Ford wrote The Good Soldier, the book on which his reputation most surely rests, in deliberate emulation of the nineteenth-century French novels he so admired. In this way he was able to explore the theme of sexual betrayal and its poisonous after-effects with a psychological intimacy as yet unknown in the English novel.

When John Dowell and his wife befriend Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, they appear to be the perfect couple. He is a distinguished soldier and she is beautiful and intelligent.…