Fanny Price is a young girl from a large and relatively poor family, who is taken from them at age 10 to be raised by her rich uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas, a baronet, and Lady Bertram, of Mansfield Park. She had previously lived with her own parents, Lieut. Price and his wife, Frances (Fanny), Lady Bertram's sister. Sh...
The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England. Elizabeth is the second of five daughters of a country gentleman living near the fictional town of Meryton in Hertf...
Emma Woodhouse, aged 20 at the start of the novel, is a young, beautiful, witty, and privileged woman in Regency England. She lives on the fictional estate of Hartfield in Surrey in the village of Highbury with her elderly widowed father, a hypochondriac who is excessively concerned for the health and safety of his lo...
"The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in the literary annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843. The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, though Poe skews historical facts. The narrator of the story...
"The Masque of the Red Death", originally published as "The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy" (1842), is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The story follows Prince Prospero's attempts to avoid a dangerous plague, known as the Red Death, by hiding in his abbey. He, along with many other wealthy nobles, hosts a masquera...
"Macbeth" tells the story of a brave Scottish general named Macbeth who receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the throne for himself. He is then wracked with guilt and parano...
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" tells of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures. The tale plays with logic, giving the story lasting popularity with adults as well as children.
"Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There" is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The themes and settings of Through the Looking-Glass make it a kind of mirror image of Wonderland: the first book begins outdoors, in the warm month of May (4 May), uses frequent changes in size as a plot device...
Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine's brother Hindley and wrongly believing that his love for Catherine is...
"A House of Pomegranates" is a collection of fairy tales. "The Young King" tells the story of the illegitimate shepherd son of the recently dead king's daughter of an unnamed country. Being his only heir, he is brought to the palace to await his accession. "The Birthday of the Infanta" is about a hunchbacked dwarf, fo...
The story is about an orphan, Oliver Twist, who endures a miserable existence in a workhouse and then is placed with an undertaker. He escapes and travels to London where he meets the Artful Dodger, leader of a gang of juvenile pickpockets. Naively unaware of their unlawful activities, Oliver is led to the lair of the...
"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" is about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River.
This is the debut novel of English author Anne Brontë, first published in December 1847 ( and originally written under the pen name, Acton Bell). The novel follows governess Agnes Grey as she works with the families of the English gentry, and is considered to be largely based on Brontë's own experiences as a governes...
The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories by English author Rudyard Kipling. The stories are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to give moral lessons. A principal character is the boy or "man-cub" Mowgli, who is raised in the jungle by wolves. Other characters include Shere Khan the tiger and B...
Anne of Green Gables recounts the adventures of Anne Shirley, a young orphan girl mistakenly sent to Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a middle-aged brother and sister who have a farm on Prince Edward Island and who had intended to adopt a boy to help them.
Jean Valjean is the protagonist of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables. Hugo depicts the character's 19-year-long struggle to lead a normal life after serving a prison sentence for stealing bread to feed his sister's children during a time of economic depression and various attempts to escape from prison. Valjean...
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (French: Notre-Dame de Paris, "Our Lady of Paris") is a French Romantic/Gothic novel by Victor Hugo, published in 1831. The original French title refers to Notre Dame Cathedral, on which the story is centered. Frederic Shoberl's 1833 English translation was published as The Hunchback of Not...
After Éponine's release from prison, she finds Marius at "The Field of the Lark" and sadly tells him that she found Cosette's address. She leads him to Valjean's and Cosette's house on Rue Plumet, and Marius watches the house for a few days. He and Cosette then finally meet and declare their love for one another. Thén...
Marius Pontmercy (French pronunciation: [maʁjys pɔ̃mɛʁsi]) is a fictional character, one of the protagonists of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables. He is a young student, and the suitor of Cosette. Believing Cosette lost to him, and determined to die, he joins the revolutionary association Friends of the ABC, wh...
Cosette is a fictional character in the novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Her birth name, Euphrasie, is only mentioned briefly. As the orphaned child of an unmarried mother deserted by her father, Hugo never gives her a surname. In the course of the novel, she is mistakenly identified as Ursule, Lark, or Mademoisel...
Fantine is a fictional character in Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables. She is a young orphaned grisette in Paris who becomes pregnant by a rich student. After he abandons her, she is forced to look after their child, Cosette, on her own. Originally a pretty and naïve girl, Fantine is eventually forced by circums...
The Iliad (sometimes referred to as the Song of Ilion or Song of Ilium) is an ancient Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (Ilium) by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks o...
The Odyssey (Greek: Ὀδύσσεια Odýsseia] in Classical Attic) is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The Odyssey is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second-oldest extant work of Western literature; th...
A Study in Scarlet is a 1887 detective novel by British author Arthur Conan Doyle. Written in 1886, the story marks the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who would become two of the most famous characters in popular fiction. The book's title derives from a speech given by Holmes, an amateur detect...
The Return of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of 13 Sherlock Holmes stories, originally published in 1903-1904, by Arthur Conan Doyle. The stories were published in the Strand Magazine in Great Britain, and Collier's in the United States. Cover made by the wonderful @-capetown
Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, "Dracula" tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England, and the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.
A Christmas Carol tells the story of bitter and miserly Ebenezer Scrooge and his ideological, ethical, and emotional transformation resulting from supernatural visits by Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come.
On Christmas Eve, around 1812, Pip, an orphan who is about six years old, encounters an escaped convict in the village churchyard while visiting the graves of his mother, father, and siblings. The convict scares Pip into stealing food and a file to grind away his shackles, from the home he shares with his abusive olde...
