Books in Everyman's library 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)

Stevenson described the protagonists of The Ebb Tide (1894), who commandeer a schooner in pursuit of riches and adventure, as a "troop of swine." Yet in their murderous greed for pearls amidst the cruel splendor of Attwater's island, these characters lay bare the dilemmas of men morally at sea, their ideals and refinements corrupted by colonial illusions and cast adrift in unknown waters.

If William Shakespeare had never written a single play, if his reputation rested entirely upon the substantial and sterling body of nondramatic verse he left behind, he would still hold the position he does in the hierarchy of world literature. The strikingly modern sonnets–intimate, baroque, and expansive at once; the invigorating narratives drawn from classical subjects; and the flawless lyricism represented by a poem like “The Phoenix and the Turtle”–permanently deepen our understanding of the multiplicity and extravagant energy of our greatest poet. ISBN-13: 9780679417415 Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Publication date: 12/28/1992 Series: Everyman's Library Pages: 312 Sales rank: 526,095 Product dimensions: 5.17 (w) x 8.29 (h) x 0.92 (d)

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

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.

The career of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400) developed from a period of French influence in the late 1630s, through the 'middle period' of both French and Italian influences. Troilus and Criseyde (c.1385) is from the most important mature Italian-influenced work. Troilus and Criseyde is Chaucer's longest complete poem. The story is taken from Boccaccio's Il Filostrato. In the midst of the Trojan war, and on opposing sides, Troilus falls in love with Criseyde, aided by Criseyde's uncle Pandarus, to tragic consequence. Chaucer deepens the sense of seriousness by showing Criseyde's deliberations, and by calling into question the lovers' freedom of action. Trust not in unstable fortune, the narrator seems to be saying, but in God.