Books in Everyman's Classics series

Kate Chopin's riveting, daring story of one woman's search for personal freedom was so far ahead of its time that its publication in 1899 aroused a storm of controversy violent enough to end its author's career. With an effortless, sure-handed artistry, Chopin tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a young mother and model wife, whose romantic involvement with a young man during a vacation at a seaside resort allows her for the first time to imagine a new, freer life. Upon her return to New Orleans, Edna leaves her husband's home for her own cottage and begins an affair, only to discover that the constraints of social custom may be more powerful than she thought. Contemporary readers and reviewers were shocked by the frank, unapologetic treatment of adultery in The Awakening. The fact that we have the book at all is the most convincing tribute to its enduring, irrepressible power. Introduction by Elaine Showalter(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

A Superb historical novel set in the late seventeenth century, Rob Roy is also an adventure story. Using his favourite device of contrasting characters and places, Scott sets romantic rural Scotland against the prosaic cities of Glasgow and London. In his tragic portrait of Rob Roy MacGregor, he shows the feudal world of the Highlands withering away under the onslaught of new commercial and political realities. With his own sympathies equally balanced, he is perfectly quipped to portray the struggle between them. Rob Roy will be a major United Artists film for release in the summer of 1995. Directed by Michael Caton Jones, it stars Liam Neeson, John Hurt, Jessica Lange, Tim Roth and Eric Stolpz.

A remarkably vivid depiction of village life provides the backdrop to George Eliot’s first novel, a story of love and betrayal invested with social realism of unprecedented sensitivity. Adam Bede is an upstanding young carpenter whose greatest weakness is his infatuation with the self-absorbed village beauty, Hetty Sorrel. Hetty has secretly set her sights on Captain Arthur Donnithorne, heir to the local squire’s estate; his abandonment of her and her engagement to Adam set in motion a tragedy that will touch many people’s lives. When Hetty lands in prison, accused of murder and facing a sentence of execution by hanging, it is her fervent young cousin Dinah Morris, a Methodist preacher, whose intervention offers both Hetty and Adam comfort and the hope of peace.The evocations of a lost rural world for which Adam Bede was so resoundingly praised on its publication in 1859 are charged in Eliot’s hands with a personal compassion that intensifies the novel’s outer dramas of seduction and betrayal and inner dramas of moral growth and redemption. With an introduction by Leonee Ormond

In the third novel of the Barsetshire series, Trollope continues his study of a small cathedral city and the surrounding rural community which he presents as a microcosm of nineteenth-century England. Through each of the Barsershire novels can be read on its own, the six together present an incomparable portrait of life and manners in the quiet but troubled heart of a great nation at the zenith of its prosperity. DOCTOR THORNE revolves round the characters of the doctor and his niece, Mary, but the complex social life of which they are a part, ranging in scope from great houses to poor cottages, is almost more important than individual characters. If God is in the details, these novels are indeed divine.

Title: Kirsteen, the story of a Scotch family seventy years ago.Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.The HISTORY OF BRITAIN & IRELAND collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. As well as historical works, this collection includes geographies, travelogues, and titles covering periods of competition and cooperation among the people of Great Britain and Ireland. Works also explore the countries' relations with France, Germany, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Scandinavia. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification:++++ British Library Oliphant; 1890. 3 vol. ; 8º. 012640.i.9.

Anthony Trollope's stock-in-trade was the life of the great drawing rooms of mid-Victorian England, where the thirst for wealth and political power and the need for love continually formed and reformed in unexpected, illuminating combinations. Can You Forgive Her?, the story of Alice Vavasor, her conundrums in love, and her confusions about the rights and duties of a modern, is the first novel in his magnificent Palliser series; it is energized on every page by the affectionate and ironic delight Trollope felt in observing the entanglements of his splendid characters. (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

Graham Greene's classic study in the banality of evil is set in the unforgettably evoked underworld of pre-war Brighton where Pinkie, a small-time ganster, meets his nemesis at the hands of Ida, the girl he betrays, Published in 1938, Greene's most celebrated novel signalled the beginning of the long series of masterpieces produced between then and his death in 1991