Books in Everyman's Classics series

When John Harmon—who has been left a fortune if he will marry the girl his miserly father chose for him—is found floating dead in the Thames, he sets in motion a story overflowing with cases of deception and mistaken identity, of murder and attempted murder, of sin and redemption. The influence of the notorious Harmon inheritance ripples through a large cast of vividly drawn characters from every level of society, including Noddy Boffin, known as “the Golden Dustman”; the one-legged villain Silas Wegg; willful Bella Wilfer; saintly Lizzie Hexam; the sharp-witted doll’s dressmaker Jenny Wren; the social-climbing Veneerings; the ruthless speculator Fascination Fledgeby; and the river-scavenging corpse robbers Gaffer Hexam and Rogue Riderhood. Out of this flurry of invention Dickens creates in Our Mutual Friend a portrait of a city and a civilization that is at once indignant, compassionate, and utterly unforgettable.Charles Dickens’s last completed novel features one of his most surreal and haunting visions of London, shadowed by towering dust heaps that supply the corrupting riches at the heart of the plot and washed by the dark river that winds its way insistently through the story.This edition reprints the original Everyman’s preface by G. K. Chesterton and features forty illustrations by Marcus Stone.

Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe, the narrator and heroine of Villette, achieves by degrees an authentic independence from both outer necessity and inward grief. Charlotte Brontë's last novel, published in 1853, has a dramatic force comparable to that of her other masterpiece, Jane Eyre, as well as strikingly modern psychological insight and a revolutionary understanding of human loneliness. With an introduction by Lucy Hughes-Hallet.

Robert is a difficult and disturbed young man. He turns to his Calvinist faith for solace but finds it hard to get along with other people. After he falls in with the mysterious and charming Gil-Martin, his actions become more and more extreme. He convinces himself that he is one of the chosen few and that, therefore, all his actions are right and good . . . even murder.James Hogg ('the Ettrick Shepherd') was a poet, novelist, and farmer whose work was discovered by Sir Walter Scott and admired by writers as different as Wordsworth and Byron. His most famous book, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), is striking in its use of Calvinist doctrine, demonology, and a highly modern psychological perception to tell the story of the criminal Colwan, deluded by occult forces into thinking he represents an instrument of divine justice and vengeance. Introduction by Roger Lewis(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

Samuel Butler was among the most wide-ranging of the accomplished crew of late Victorian writers to which be belonged -- a forceful controversialist in the debates that surrounded Darwin's theory of evolution, a painter who sometimes exhibited at the Royal Academy, an idiosyncratic critic and a gifted travel writer, and even, in his early years, a highly successful sheep farmer in New Zealand. He was also, as The Way of All Flesh, his deterministic tale of the havoc wrought by genetic inheritance, suggests, one of the great British masters of the novel of ideas.

This collection from Everyman€™s Library provides the complete works of one of the most popular authors in English literature. Each of Jane Austen€™s masterpieces is enchantingly funny, touchingly and wittily told, and filled with a dazzling gallery of characters. These beautiful, clothbound classics are essentials for any home library.Titles included:EmmaMansfield ParkNorthanger AbbyPersuasionPride and PrejudiceSandition and Other StoriesSense and Sensibility

The legends surrounding Oedipus of Thebes and his ill-fated offspring provide the subject matter for Sophocles’ three greatest plays, which together represent Greek drama at the pinnacle of its achievement. Oedipus the King, the most famous of the three, has been characterized by critics from Aristotle to Coleridge as the perfect exemplar of the art of tragedy, in its unforgettable portrayal of a man’s failed attempt to escape his fate. In Oedipus at Colonus, the blind king finds his final release from the sufferings the gods have brought upon him, and Antigone completes the downfall of the House of Cadmus through the actions of Oedipus’s magnificent and uncompromising daughter defending her ideals to the death. All three of The Theban Plays, while separate, self-contained dramas, draw from the same rich well of myth and showcase Sophocles’ enduring power. Translated by David Grene.

Set in Roth's native Galicia, is one of his finest and most artistically satisfying novels. The exploration of evil, justice and suffering which forms the underlying theme, is a recurrent one in Roth's writing, and with his central character, Anselm Eibenschutz, the just Inspector at odds with himself and a hostile world that will ultimately destroy him, Roth has created one of his most convincing and deeply felt figures. 'Joseph Roth was one of the really great writers of our day; his German prose has always been a model of perfect style. He wrote every page of his books with the fervor of a true poet; like a goldsmith he polished and repolished every sentence till the rhythm was perfect and the colour brilliant. His artistic conscience was as inexorable as his heart was passionate and tender.' So wrote Stefan Zweig shortly after Roth's premature death in 1939. Since that time his reputation has grown steadily, and he now stands among the great prose writers in the German language. First published in 1937 translated by David Le Vay. Introduction by Beatrice Musgrave.

The wealthy American widower Adam Verver and his shy daughter, Maggie, live in Europe, closely tied through their love of art and their mutual admiration. Maggie's future seems assured when she becomes the wife of a charming, though impoverished, Italian prince. But when Adam marries his daughter's friend Charlotte Stant, unaware that she is the prince's mistress, the stage is set for a complex and indirect battle between the two wives. The brilliant Charlotte is determined to keep her lover, while Maggie is determined to protect her beloved father from any knoweldge of their shared betrayal. The acuity with which Henry James calibrates the four characters' delicately shifting alliances and documents the maturation of a naïve young woman marks this as a magnificent achievement. The Golden Bowl was not only James's last major work but also the novel in which his unparalleled gift for psychological drama reached its height.Introduction by Denis Donoghue