Literary Criticism
Characters of Shakespeare's Plays
This famous Shakespearean exploration illuminates its plays through the frame of character, while also weighing theme, mood, structure and p…
Our Mutual Friend
Our Mutual Friend (written in the years 1864–65) is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, …
The Novels of Jane Austen
An 1859 essay by the prominent philosopher and literary critic, G. H. Lewes, who was an enthusiastic promoter of the novels of Jane Austen a…
The Hungry Stones
The Hungry Stones is a captivating collection of short stories by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, exploring the depths of human emotion …
Jenny
Jenny Winge is a Norwegian expatriate studying art in Rome, part of a Bohemian group of friends who explore the ancient City in an intoxicat…
Audrey Craven
In May Sinclair’s remarkable first novel, Audrey Craven is a beautiful young woman who has by her idiosyncrasies acquired a thoroughly undes…
A Tale of a Tub
A Tale of a Tub was the first major work written by Jonathan Swift, composed between 1694 and 1697, that was eventually published in 1704. I…
The Last of the Valerii
An unnamed American painter resident in Rome serves as narrator in this story, watching as his god-daughter Martha, becomes the wife of Prin…
The Idiot
The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Ru…
The Death of Society
A weary survivor of the Great War, Major Rane Smith wanders in a great ennui amidst the mystical beauties of the fjords of Norway after the …
The Voyage Out
The Voyage Out is the first novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1915 by Duckworth; and published in the U.S. in 1920 by Doran. One of Wool…
Botchan
Botchan is the story of a young math teacher from Tokyo whose first assignment takes him to a middle school in the country side. His arrival…
Pearl
Written in the 14th century by the Gawain poet, 'Pearl' is an elegiac poem reflecting on the death of a young daughter, pictured as a pearl …
A London Life
A devoted sister attempts to check her sibling's scandalous behavior in the world of British high society. A delightful comedy of Anglo-Ame…
Companionable Books
Many books are dry and dusty, there is no juice in them; and many are soon exhausted, you would no more go back to them than to a squeezed o…
Hagar's Daughter
Hagar's Daughter was first published serially in "The Colored American Magazine" in 1901-1902 by Pauline E. Hopkins, a prominent A…
Robert Browning
There is an old anecdote, probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to Browning asking him for the meaning of one of…
The Portrait of a Lady
The Portrait of a Lady is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine in 1880-1881 …
The Rider on the White Horse
Hauke Haien, a young man of 24 years, has just beome dikemaster in Northern Frisia. Against the resistance of many of the townfolk, he has a…
The Beast in the Jungle
The Beast in the Jungle is a poignant exploration of fate and the human condition, centered on John Marcher, a man who believes he is destin…