Elizabeth Klett
The Story of Avis
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's 1877 novel is set in a New England college town, and focuses on Avis Dobell, a professor's daughter. Avis is a ta…
The Greater Inclination
This is Edith Wharton's earliest published collection of short stories (1899). Like much of her later work, they touch on themes of marriag…
Quicksand
Quicksand is a 1928 novel by Nella Larsen, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance. It focuses on Helga Crane, a mixed-race woman who is a school…
The Fifth Queen
The Fifth Queen invites listeners into the tumultuous world of Tudor England, where ambition and desire intertwine in the court of King Henr…
Life in the Iron Mills
This 1861 novella was the first published work by Rebecca Harding Davis: writer, social reformer, and pioneer of literary realism. It tell…
Pauline's Passion and Punishment
Before she wrote Little Women and Little Men, Louisa, writing under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, had this `blood and thunder' thriller (as sh…
The Waste Land (version 3)
The Waste Land is T. S. Eliot's Modernist masterpiece, first published in 1920. Rich in allusions to Shakespeare, Dante, Baudelaire, the Bib…
The House of the Vampire
The House of the Vampire is a 1907 novella that is a very unusual vampire story. A young writer comes under the powerful influence of a myst…
Goblin Market and Other Poems
Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) is British writer Christina Rossetti's first book of poetry. The title poem is her most famous work: a …
In Memoriam A.H.H.
In Memoriam is Tennyson's elegiac tribute to his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died in 1833 at the age of 22. Tennyson wrote this long poe…
The Turn of the Screw (version 2)
Henry James' classic ghost story comprises the written testimony of a young governess, charged with looking after two small children at an i…
Ophelia, the Rose of Elsinore
This story is from Mary Cowden Clarke's multi-volume work The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, in which she imagined the early lives of c…
Olalla
"Olalla" was a "shilling shocker" written for the Christmas season in 1885, just before the publication of Stevenson's D…
The Dead (version 2)
This novella is the final story in Joyce's collection Dubliners. It describes a Christmas party given by Kate and Julia Morkan, two elderly …
The Princess
The Princess is a serio-comic blank verse narrative poem, written by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1847. The poem tells the story of an hero…
Shakespeare's Sonnets (version 4)
Shakespeare's sequence of 154 sonnets deals with such themes as love, time, death, immortality, lust, and sex. The poems follow but also dep…
The Marne: a tale of the war
American writer Edith Wharton is known for her novels of manners set in old New York; yet much of her adult life was spent in France. She li…
Maude
Maude is a novella by Christina Rossetti, written in 1850 but published posthumously in 1897. Considered by scholars to be semi-autobiograph…
News From Nowhere
News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialis…
Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort
American novelist Edith Wharton was living in Paris when World War I broke out in 1914. She obtained permission to visit sites behind the li…