A young man just beginning a new job in London meets with a strange woman on a moonlit road, offers her assistance getting into the city and then finds she may have just escaped an asylum. Hidden connections are unveiled between the family that employs the young man and the mysterious woman, pulling the reader into a suspenseful web of plots within plots, theft, betrayal, mistaken identities and attempted murder. Punctuating his dramatic narrative...

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions is the first modern autobiography, and arguably the most influential autobiography ever written. What we think of as the "self," our self-sufficient identity, finds its roots in the Confessions. Rousseau's great autobiography speaks to us with a voice that is as relevant today as it was revolutionary and unsettling in the eighteenth...

The first novel of Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire series, this work introduces the fictional cathedral town of Barchester and many of its clerical inhabitants. Originally published in 1855, the story centers on Mr. Septimus Harding who has been granted the comfortable wardenship of Hiram's Hospital, an almshouse from a medieval charity of the diocese. Mr. Harding, a fundamentally good man and an excellent musician, conscientiously fulfills his...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Young Charlotte Heywood arrives in Sanditon, a newly established seaside resort, with the Parkers: patrons and enthusiastic promoters of the town. Just as the town seeks to reinvent itself as a fashionable destination, Charlotte Heywood attempts to begin anew amongst its residents. As she begins to settle into Sanditon society, with the Parkers and the rich...

The articles collected in George Orwell's Essays illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of this century-a man who elevated political writing to an art. This outstanding collection brings together Orwell's longer, major essays and a fine selection of shorter pieces that includes "My Country Right or Left," "Decline of the English Murder," "Shooting an Elephant," and "A Hanging." With great originality and wit, Orwell unfolds...

"The first one-volume collection of all of Lorrie Moore's short stories."--

The first novel of Conrad's impressive list of works, "Almayer's Folly" revolves around the Dutch trader Kaspar Almayer and his life in the Borneo jungles in the late 19th century. Spurred by his desire for riches, he marries the adopted Malayan daughter of Captain Lingard, an affluent man who then requires Almayer to run his trading post in Sambir, in the Borneo jungles. While his chances of inheriting Lingard's wealth have increased, Almayer is...

With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels,...