Books in Everyman's Library Children's Classics series

Frances Hodgson Burnett's celebration of the kingdom of earth takes place in a secret garden, where the orphaned Mary Lennox and the invalid boy, Colin, are magically restored to health and well-being by Nature's mysterious living force. The original illustrations, by Charles Robinson, are perfect visual companions to the rich and illuminating text.

Of the three late masterpieces that crown the extraordinary literary achievement of Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902) is at once the most personal and the most elemental. James drew on the memory of a beloved cousin who died young to create one of the three central characters, Milly Theale, an heiress with a short time to live and a passion for experiencing life to its fullest. To the creation of the other two, Merton Densher and the magnificent, predatory Kate Croy, who conspire in an act of deceit and betrayal, he brought a lifetime's distilled wisdom about the frailty of the human soul when it is trapped in the depths of need and desire. And he brought to the drama that unites these three characters, in the drawing rooms of London and on the storm-lit piazzas of Venice, a starkness and classical purity almost unprecedented in his work.Under its brilliant, coruscating surfaces, beyond the scrim of its marvelous rhetorical and psychological devices, The Wings of the Dove offers an unfettered vision of our civilization and its discontents. It represents a culmination of James's art and, as such, of the art of the novel itself.

First published in 1885, Stevenson's verses so truly reflect the feelings of young children--about being small, the bliss of going up in a swing so high, discovering one's shadow, happiness and sorrow and dreaming--that they have never ceased to be an essential part of a child's library. Robinson's beautiful pictures originally appeared in 1896 in the first illustrated edition.

The story of an irrepressible orphan girl in the Swiss Alps, written in 1881, has long been one of the most beloved and best-selling children's classics in the world. This hardcover edition features a gilt spine, a silk ribbon marker, and beautiful full-color illustrations by Austrian artist William Sharp.Heidi's story begins when she is orphaned at the age of five and sent to live with her reclusive, embittered grandfather on a mountainside above a Swiss village. Heidi's grandfather has been estranged from the villagers for years and he resents the child's arrival, but she wins his affection with her enthusiasm and cheer. Her rural idyll is cruelly interrupted, however, when her aunt sends her to the city to be a hired companion to a wealthy girl in a wheelchair. Clara is delighted by her new friend, but the family's strict housekeeper tries to repress Heidi's high spirits and the girl begins to waste away, pining for her mountain home. The resolution of Heidi's dilemma transforms the lives of everyone around her and has entranced readers for generations with its vision of the joys of country life and the power of love and friendship.

Northanger Abbey is a perfectly aimed literary parody that is also a withering satire of the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century. But most of all, it is the story of the initiation into life of its naïve but sweetly appealing heroine, Catherine Morland, a willing victim of the contemporary craze for Gothic literature who is determined to see herself as the heroine of a dark and thrilling romance. When she is invited to Northanger Abbey, the grand though forbidding ancestral seat of her suitor, Henry Tilney, she finds herself embroiled in a real drama of misapprehension, mistreatment, and mortification, until common sense and humor–and a crucial clarification of Catherine’s financial status–resolve her problems and win her the approval of Henry’s formidable father.Written in 1798 but not published until after Austen’s death in 1817, Northanger Abbey is characteristically clearheaded and strong, and infinitely subtle in its comedy.

Highly acclaimed at its publication in 1913, The Custom of the Country is a cutting commentary on America’s nouveaux riches, their upward-yearning aspirations and their eventual downfalls. Through her heroine, the beautiful and ruthless Undine Spragg, a spoiled heiress who looks to her next materialistic triumph as her latest conquest throws himself at her feet, Edith Wharton presents a startling, satiric vision of social behavior in all its greedy glory. As Undine moves from America’s heartland to Manhattan, and then to Paris, Wharton’s critical eye leaves no social class unscathed.

“Doctor Foster went to Glo’ster, In a shower of rain; He stepped in a puddle right up to his middle, And never went there again.” A bumper crop of nursery rhymes for the delight of the very young. In his Introduction, Jerrold explains how his selection was based on earlier collections made by John Newbery, Joseph Ritson and James Orchard Halliwell. He goes on to add, “ Students divide our rhymes into narrative pieces, historical folk-lore, game rhymes, counting-out rhymes, jingles, fragments, etcetera, but for the children for whom and by whom they are remembered, and for whom they are here collected and pictured anew, they are just — Nursery Rhymes.”