When two sisters appear to be deserted by the young men they had intended to marry, the stage is set for a delicious comedy of manners that not only showcases Austen's perception, humor and incomparable prose, but offers a splendid glimpse of upper and middle-class English society of the early 19th century.

'They lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.' Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War, is a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s, the world in which she grew up, and from which she spent her life escaping. Newland Archer, Wharton's protagonist, charming, tactful,...

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 novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed.

Is he in heaven?-Is he in hell? That demmed, elusive Pimpernel? Sir Percy Blakeney lives a double life in the England of 1792: at home he is an idle fop and a leader of fashion, but in abroad he is the Scarlet Pimpernel, a master of disguise who saves aristocrats from the guillotine. When the revolutionary French state seeks to unmask him, Percy's estranged, independent wife, Marguerite, unwittingly sets their agent on her husband's track. Percy's...

During the 1790s, with Ireland in political crisis, Maria Edgeworth made a surprisingly rebellious choice: in Castle Rackrent, her first novel, she adopted an Irish Catholic voice to narrate the decline of a family from her own Anglo-Irish class. Castle Rackrent's narrator, Thady Quirk, gives us four generations of Rackrent heirs - Sir Patrick, the dissipated spendthrift; Sir Murtagh, the litigating fiend; Sir Kit, the brutal husband and gambling...

Henry Jones, an unprepossessing London insurance clerk, knows that his uncle has disinherited him. The old man's will, made out at the last minute in favour of Henry's charming cousin Isabel Brodrick, lies neatly folded in a well-thumbed volume of sermons in his book-room; Henry saw him put it there before he died. Unfortunately nobody else knows where the will is, and Henry stands to lose everything by making the knowledge public. Cousin Henry, first...

Plautus was the single greatest influence on Western comedy. Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and Molière's The Miser are two subsequent classics directly based on Plautine originals. Plautus himself borrowed from the Greeks, but his jokes, rapid dialogue, bawdy humour, and irreverent characterizations are the original work of an undisputed genius. The comedies printed here show him at his best, and professor Segal's translations keep their fast, rollicking...

This novel, which has always been regarded as one of Scott's finest, opens with the Edinburgh riots of 1736. The people of the city have been infuriated by the actions of John Porteous, Captain of the Guard, and when they hear that his death has been reprieved by the distant monarch they ignore the Queen and resolve to take their own revenge. At the cente of the story is Edinburgh's forbidding Tolbooth prison, known by all as the Heart of Midlothian....

Written by an eccentric Anglican curate, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) brought the terrors of the Gothic novel to a new fever pitch of intensity. Its tormented villain seeks a victim to release from his fatal pact with the devil, and Maturin's bizarre narrative structure whirls the reader from rural Ireland to an idyllic Indian island, from a London madhouse to the dungeons of the Spanish inquisition. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's...