Penguin English Library

The Penguin English Library Edition of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne 'I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift out of it for my soul; so must be obliged to go on writing like a Dutch commentator to the end of the chapter,

The Penguin English Library Edition of Villette by Charlotte Bronte 'That evening more firmly than ever fastened into my soul the conviction that Fate was of stone, and Hope a false idol - blind, bloodless, and of granite core. I felt, too, that the trial God had appointed me was gaining its

The Penguin English Library Edition of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding '"Sir, I am concerned at the Trouble I give you; nay indeed my Nakedness may well make me ashamed to look you in the Face ..." Jones offered her his Coat; but, I know not for what Reason, she absolutely refused the most earnest

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte 'She looked so like herself that I knew not how to bear it' In this sensational, hard-hitting and passionate tale of marital cruelty, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall sees a mysterious tenant, Helen Graham, unmasked not

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "The Warden" by Anthony Trollope. 'It was so hard that the pleasant waters of his little stream should be disturbed and muddied ...that his quiet paths should be made a battlefield: that the unobtrusive corner of the world which been allotted to

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler 'The greater part of every family is always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large family, it is as much as can be expected' Written with great humour, irony and honesty, The Way of All Flesh

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne 'Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, - stern and wild ones, - and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss' Fiercely romantic and hugely influential, The Scarlet Letter is the tale of

'Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world'. In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminded by Verloc, a Russian spy

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by james Hogg 'He was constantly harassed with the idea, that the next time he lifted his eyes, he would to a certainty see that face, the most repulsive to all his feelings of aught the earth

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "The Return of the Native" by Thomas Hardy. 'Do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life - music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that is going on in the great arteries of the world?' Tempestuous Eustacia

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy 'Here - I am waiting to know about this offer of mine. The woman is no good to me. Who'll have her?' In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair.

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot If life had no love in it, what else was there for Maggie? Tragic and moving, The Mill on the Floss is a novel of grand passions and tormented lives. As the rebellious Maggie's fiery spirit and imaginative nature bring

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Monk by Matthew Lewis 'He now saw himself stained with the most loathed and monstrous sins, the object of universal execration ... doomed to perish in tortures the most severe' Shocking, erotic and violent, The Monk is the story of Ambrosio, torn between

The Penguin English Library Edition of The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton 'It was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions' A searing, shocking tale of women as consumer items in a man's world, The House of

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells 'That black figure, with its eyes of fire, struck down through all my adult thoughts and feelings, and for a moment the forgotten horrors of childhood came back to my mind' Adrift in a dinghy, Edward Prendick, the

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "The Last Chronicle of Barset" by Anthony Trollope. "He is so scandalously weak, and she is so radically vicious, that they cannot but be wrong together. The very fact that such a man should be a bishop among us is to me terribly strong evidence of

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Confidence - Man and Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville 'Life is a pic-nic en costume; one must take a part, assume a character, stand ready in a sensible way to play the fool' In The Confidence-Man, Melville's unnerving and hallucinatory satire on

The Penguin English Library Edition of Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy "I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your servant, if I may not as your wife; so that I could only be near you, and get glimpses of you, and think of you as mine ... I long for only one thing in heaven

The Penguin English Library Edition of Shirley by Charlotte Bronte 'Alas, Experience! No other mentor has so wasted and frozen a face as yours: none wears a robe so black, none bears a rod so heavy ...' Struggling manufacturer Robert Moore has introduced labour saving machinery to his Yorkshire

The Penguin English Library Edition of Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence '"She was a brazen hussy." "She wasn't. - And she was pretty, wasn't she?" "I didn't look ... And tell your girls, my son, that when they're running after you, they're not to come and ask your mother for you - tell them

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "Pamela" by Samuel Richards. 'O the deceitfulness of the heart of man! This John, whom I took to be the honestest of men ...this very fellow was all the while a vile hypocrite, and a perfidious wretch, and helping to carry on my ruin'.

The Penguin English Library Edition of New Grub Street by George Gissing 'If only I had the skill, I would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies' In New Grub Street George Gissing re-created a microcosm of London's literary society as he had experienced

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "Nicholas Nickleby" by Charles Dickens. '"I may grow rich!" repeated Nicholas, with a mournful smile, "ay, and I may grow old. But rich or poor, or old or young, we shall ever be the same to each other, and in that our comfort lies"'. The work of

The Penguin English Library Edition of Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton 'He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface' Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a

The Penguin English Library Edition of Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell "The rich know nothing of the trials of the poor; I say, if they don't know, they ought to know. We're their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to live as

The Penguin English Library Edition of Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin 'My hour is come ... the clock of eternity is about to strike, but its knell must be unheard by mortal ears!' This violent, profound, baroque and blackly humorous novel is the story of Melmoth, who has sold his soul in

The Penguin English Library Edition of Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens 'You talk very easily of hours, sir! How long do you suppose, sir, that an hour is to a man who is choking for want of air?' A masterly evocation of the state and psychology of imprisonment, Little Dorrit is one of the

The Penguin English Library Edition of Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding 'Kissing, Joseph, is but a prologue to a Play. Can I believe a young fellow of your Age and Complexion will be content with Kissing?' Henry Fielding's riotous tale of innocents in a corrupt world was one of the earliest

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy. 'As you got older, ...you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your

The Penguin English Library Edition of Kim by Rudyard Kipling 'He knew the wonderful walled city of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was hand in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed of; and he lived in a life wild as that of the Arabian

The Penguin English Library Edition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett 'What is the society of London, that I should be tempted, for its sake, to mortify my senses, and compound with such uncleanness as my soul abhors?' Smollett's savage, boisterously funny lambasting of eighteenth-century

The Penguin English Library Edition of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad 'The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, rage - who can tell? - but truth - truth stripped of its

The Penguin English Library Edition of Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope 'He was sickened also with all these lies. His very soul was dismayed by the dirt through which he was forced to wade. He had become unconsciously connected with the lowest dregs of mankind, and would have to see his name

The Penguin English Library Edition of Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy 'I cannot allow any man to - to criticise my private conduct!' she exclaimed. 'Nor will I for a minute' Hardy's powerful novel of swift sexual passion and slow-burning loyalty centres on Bathsheba Everdene, a proud

The Penguin English Library Edition of Evelina by Frances Burney 'O Sir, how much uneasiness must I suffer, to counterbalance one short morning of happiness!' In this comic and sharply incisive satire of excess and affectations, beautiful young Evelina falls victim to the rakish advances of Sir

The Penguin English Library Edition of Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope 'You must give up this mad idea, Frank ... there is but one course left open to you. You MUST marry money' Doctor Thorne, considered by Trollope to be the best of his works, is a telling examination of the relationship

The Penguin English Library Edition of Dracula by Bram Stoker 'Alone with the dead! I dare not go out, for I can hear the low howl of the wolf through the broken window' A chilling masterpiece of the horror genre, Dracula also illuminated dark corners of Victorian sexuality. When Jonathan Harker

'Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show' Dickens's epic, exuberant novel is one of the greatest coming-of-age stories in literature. It chronicles David Copperfield's extraordinary journey through life, as

The Penguin English Library Edition of Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell 'Just at this moment he passed us on the stairs, making such a graceful bow, in reply to which I dropped a curtsey - all foreigners have such polite manners, one catches something of it' Cranford is an affectionate and often

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "Daniel Deronda" by George Eliot. 'What can I do?...I must get up in the morning and do what every one else does. It is all like a dance set beforehand. I seem to see all that can be - and I am tired and sick of it. And the world is all confusion to