Books in Original Classics series

They had already had their half hour with mamma which made so sweet a beginning of each day yet she too must have a liberal share of the eagerly bestowed caresses; while Bruno a great Newfoundland the pet playfellow and guardian of the little flock testified his delight in the scene by leaping about among them fawning upon one and another wagging his tail and uttering again and again a short joyous bark.

During a stay at Viamede, the family is blessed with a new addition, Lily, “on loan” from heaven for a short time. Then Elsie takes in Cousin Molly, a young girl who has been injured in a fall. Next, Elsie befriends a nearly blind child of her former governess, and Ronald once again joins the family. As Elsie’s children move from childhood into adulthood, young Elsie’s heart is captured by a fine young man.

Anthony Trollope ( 24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) was an English novelist of the Victorian era. Among his best-known works is a series of novels collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, which revolves around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote novels on political, social, and gender issues, and other topical matters. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life,but he had regained the esteem of critics by the mid-20th century. Biography: Thomas Anthony Trollope, Anthony's father, was a barrister. Though a clever and well-educated man and a Fellow of New College, Oxford, he failed at the bar due to his bad temper. In addition, his ventures into farming proved unprofitable, and he lost an expected inheritance when an elderly childless uncle remarried and had children. As a son of landed gentry, he wanted his sons to be raised as gentlemen and to attend Oxford or Cambridge. Anthony Trollope suffered much misery in his boyhood owing to the disparity between the privileged background of his parents and their comparatively small means.Born in London, Anthony attended Harrow School as a free day pupil for three years from the age of seven because his father's farm, acquired for that reason, lay in that neighbourhood. After a spell at a private school at Sunbury, he followed his father and two older brothers to Winchester College, where he remained for three years. He returned to Harrow as a day-boy to reduce the cost of his education. Trollope had some very miserable experiences at these two public schools. They ranked as two of the most élite schools in England, but Trollope had no money and no friends, and was bullied a great deal. At the age of twelve, he fantasised about suicide. However, he also daydreamed, constructing elaborate imaginary worlds. In 1827, his mother Frances Trollope moved to America with Trollope's three younger siblings, to Nashoba Commune. After that failed, she opened a bazaar in Cincinnati, which proved unsuccessful. Thomas Trollope joined them for a short time before returning to the farm at Harrow, but Anthony stayed in England throughout. His mother returned in 1831 and rapidly made a name for herself as a writer, soon earning a good income. His father's affairs, however, went from bad to worse. He gave up his legal practice entirely and failed to make enough income from farming to pay rents to his landlord, Lord Northwick. In 1834, he fled to Belgium to avoid arrest for debt. The whole family moved to a house near Bruges, where they lived entirely on Frances's earnings. In Belgium, Anthony was offered a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment. To accept it, he needed to learn French and German; he had a year in which to acquire these languages. To learn them without expense to himself and his family, he took a position as an usher (assistant master) in a school in Brussels, which position made him the tutor of thirty boys. After six weeks of this, however, he received an offer of a clerkship in the General Post Office, obtained through a family friend. He returned to London in the autumn of 1834 to take up this post.Thomas Trollope died the following year. According to Trollope, "the first seven years of my official life were neither creditable to myself nor useful to the public service." At the Post Office, he acquired a reputation for unpunctuality and insubordination. A debt of £12 to a tailor fell into the hands of a moneylender and grew to over £200; the lender regularly visited Trollope at his work to demand payments. Trollope hated his work, but saw no alternative and lived in constant fear of dismissal.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third of the crime novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the detective Sherlock Holmes. Originally serialised in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902, it is set largely on Dartmoor in Devon in England's West Country and tells the story of an attempted murder inspired by the legend of a fearsome, diabolical hound of supernatural origin. Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr. Watson investigate the case. This was the first appearance of Holmes since his apparent death in "The Final Problem", and the success of The Hound of the Baskervilles led to the character's eventual revival.

As Elsie Dinsmore grows up, her family undergoes major changes. Her father, Horace Dinsmore, falls in love and marries sweet Rose Allison, whom Elsie has loved since childhood. Soon two new members, Horace Jr. and Rosebud, join the happy family. Elsie has grown into a graceful, accomplished, and beautiful young woman of fifteen who faces the difficulties of peer pressure, the allurements of the world outside her family, and the delights and confusion of friendships both false and true. She confronts the greatest crisis of her life while visiting her maiden aunt Wealthy, when she experiences first the joy of first love and then the deep pain of betrayal. In an attempt to cure her broken heart, Elsie's family takes her on a tour of Europe. Upon her return, when she least expects it, Elsie discovers the wonder of true love.

Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (April 22, 1873 – November 21, 1945) was an American novelist who portrayed the changing world of the contemporary South. Born into an elite Virginia family in Richmond, Virginia, the young Glasgow developed in a different way from that traditional to women of her class.Due to poor health, she was educated at home in Richmond. She read deeply in philosophy, social and political theory, and European and British literature.She spent her summers at her family's Bumpass, Virginia, estate, the historic Jerdone Castle plantation, a setting that she used in her writings. Her father, Francis Thomas Glasgow, was the son of Arthur Glasgow and Catherine Anderson. He was raised in Rockbridge County, Virginia, and graduated from Washington College, now Washington and Lee University, in 1847. Glasgow's maternal uncle, Joseph Reid Anderson, graduated fourth in his class of 49 from West Point in 1836. On April 4, 1848, he purchased the Tredegar Ironworks in Richmond. When news of the secession reached Richmond, Anderson promptly joined the Army of Northern Virginia, achieving the rank of general. General Robert E. Lee asked him to return to Tredegar Ironworks to manage the manufacturing on which Lee's victory would depend. Francis Glasgow later managed the Tredegar Iron Works. Glasgow thought her father self-righteous and unfeeling.But, some of her more admirable characters reflect a Scots-Calvinist background like his and a similar "iron vein of Presbyterianism." Her mother was Anne Jane Gholson, born on December 9, 1831, at Needham, Virginia and died on October 27, 1893. She was the daughter of William Yates Gholson and Martha Anne Jane Taylor. She was the granddaughter of Congressman Thomas Gholson, Jr. and Anne Yates, and a descendant of Rev. William Yates, the College of William & Mary's fifth president (1761–1764).Gholson was also a descendant of William Randolph, a prominent colonist and land owner in the Commonwealth of Virginia. He and his wife, Mary Isham, were referred to as the "Adam and Eve" of Virginia. Anne Gholson married Francis T. Glasgow on July 14, 1853, and they had ten children together. Anne Gholson was inclined to what was then called "nervous invalidism"; some attributed this to her having borne and cared for ten children.Glasgow also dealt with "nervous invalidism" throughout her life.[citation needed] As the United States women's suffrage movement was developing in the early 1900s, Glasgow marched in the English suffrage parades in the spring of 1909. Later she spoke at the first suffrage meeting in Virginia.Glasgow felt that the movement came "at the wrong moment" for her, and her participation and interest waned.Glasgow did not at first make women’s roles her major theme, and she was slow to place heroines rather than heroes at the centers of her stories.Her later works, however, have heroines who display many of the attributes of women involved in the political movement. Glasgow died on November 21, 1945,and is buried in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia.

John Habberton (1842–1921) was an American author. He spent nearly twenty years as the literary and drama critic for the New York Herald, but he is best known for his stories about early California life, many of which were collected in his 1880 book Romance of California Life: Illustrated by Pacific Slope Stories, Thrilling, Pathetic and Humorous (New York: Baker, Pratt & Co., 1880). Habberton also wrote Helen's Babies, published in 1876 by Loring Publisher, Boston; and in the early 20th Century by George Routledge and Sons, London. In most of these copies, Habberton is not listed as the author. The novel is subtitled: "Helen's Babies with some account of their ways...innocent, crafty, angelic, impish, witching and repulsive by THEIR LATEST VICTIM." The book was one of the Ruby Books series for boys and girls. Habberton is acknowledged as the author of the book in an advertisement within the 1903 edition of Andersen's Fairy Tales published by Routledge. Habberton is acknowledged, also, in an inexpensive cardboard-back edition of "Helen's Babies" published by (and copyrighted by!) Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin in 1934. That edition is copiously illustrated by Pauline Adams. Helen's Babies was intended as just a piece of humour and aimed at an adult audience. But the hilarious novel almost instantly became a major juvenile literature success, highly estimated by the youngsters as well as authorities like Rudyard Kipling. It became a classic ranking on par with "Tom Sawyer", "Wind in the Willows", "Winnie-the Pooh" and the like. Popularity dwindled a bit after WW-II (although George Orwell mentions it very favourably in his 1946 essay on early American literature, Riding Down from Bangor), but started rising again in the 1980s. Translated into numerous foreign languages, it secured Habberton's modest share of immortality in literature. Curiously, as being one of the first pieces of an author, so insecure about his abilities, that he omitted his author name resp. wrote under pseudonym for many years. Habberton was also known under the pseudonym "Smelfungus." (Source: Initials and Pseudonyms: A Dictionary of Literary Disguises by Cushing, William).

Charles Edward Montague, (1 January 1867 – 28 May 1928), was an English journalist, known also as a writer of novels and essays.Montague was born and brought up in London, the son of an Irish Roman Catholic priest who had left the church to marry. He was educated at the City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford.[1] At Oxford he gained a First in Classical Moderations (1887) and a Second in Literae Humaniores (1889). In 1890 he was recruited by C. P. Scott to the Manchester Guardian, where he became a noted leader writer and critic; while Scott was an M.P. between 1895-1906 he was de facto editor of the paper. He married Scott's daughter Madeline in 1898. While working at the paper, Montague became a supporter of Irish Home Rule. Montague was against the First World War prior to its commencement, but once it started he believed that it was right to support it in the hope of a swift resolution. In 1914, Montague was 47, which was well over the age for enlistment. But in order to enlist, he dyed his white hair black to enable him to fool the Army into accepting him. H. W. Nevinson would later write that "Montague is the only man I know whose white hair in a single night turned dark through courage." He began as a grenadier-sergeant, and rose to lieutenant and then captain of intelligence in 1915. Later in the war, he became an armed escort for VIPs visiting the battlefield. He escorted such personalities as H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw. After the end of World War I he wrote in a strong anti-war vein. He wrote that "War hath no fury like a non-combatant." Disenchantment (1922), a collection of newspaper articles about the war,[1] was one of the first prose works to strongly criticise the way the war was fought, and is a pivotal text in the development of literature about the First World War.[3][4] Disenchantment criticised the British Press' coverage of the war and the conduct of the British generals. Montague accused the latter of being influenced by the "public school ethos" which he condemned as a "gallant robust contempt for "swats" and for all who invented new means to new ends and who trained and used their brains with a will

Ernest William Hornung (7 June 1866 – 22 March 1921) was an English author and poet known for writing the A. J. Raffles series of stories about a gentleman thief in late 19th-century London. Hornung was educated at Uppingham School; as a result of poor health he left the school in December 1883 to travel to Sydney, where he stayed for two years. He drew on his Australian experiences as a background when he began writing, initially short stories and later novels. In 1898 he wrote "In the Chains of Crime", which introduced Raffles and his sidekick, Bunny Manders; the characters were based partly on his friends Oscar Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and also on the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, created by his brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle. The series of Raffles short stories were collected for sale in book form in 1899, and two further books of Raffles short stories followed, as well as a poorly received novel. Aside from his Raffles stories, Hornung was a prodigious writer of fiction, publishing numerous books from 1890, with A Bride from the Bush to his 1914 novel The Crime Doctor. The First World War brought an end to Hornung's fictional output. His son, Oscar, was killed at the Second Battle of Ypres in July 1915. Hornung joined the YMCA, initially in England, then in France, where he helped run a canteen and library. He published two collections of poetry during the war, and then, afterwards, one further volume of verse and an account of his time spent in France, Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front. Hornung's fragile constitution was further weakened by the stress of his war work. To aid his recuperation, he and his wife visited the south of France in 1921. He fell ill from influenza on the journey, and died on 22 March 1921, aged 54. Although much of Hornung's work has fallen into obscurity, his Raffles stories continued to be popular, and have formed numerous film and television adaptations. Hornung's stories dealt with a wider range of themes than crime: he examined scientific and medical developments, guilt, class and the unequal role played by women in society. Two threads that run through a sizeable proportion of his books are Australia and cricket; the latter was also a lifelong passion.