"She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steeled his heart against her."
In love with the beautiful heiress Laura Fairlie, the impoverished art teacher Walter Hartright finds his romantic desire... More details on The Woman in White
If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of gol...
Magdalen Vanstone and her sister Norah learn the true meaning of social stigma in Victorian England only after the traumatic discovery that their dearly loved parents, whose sudden deaths have left them orphans, were not married at the time of their ... More details on No Name
The hands on the hall-clock pointed to half-past six in the morning. The house was a country residence in West Somersetshire, called Combe-Raven. The day was the fourth of March, and the year was eigh...
Three years ago, her husband stood accused of murder - and the verdict that came in from the jury was the Scottish Verdict, Not Proven. The jury had not evidence enough to convict him - nor enough to comfortably exonerate him. Eustace could not bear ... More details on The Law and the Lady
"FOR after this manner in the old time the holy women also who trusted in God adorned themselves, being in subjection unto their own husbands; even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord; whose dau...
An extraordinary modern novel in the Victorian tradition, Charles Palliser has created something extraordinary-a plot within a plot within a plot of family secrets, mysterious clues, low-born birth, high-reaching immorality, and, always, always the f... More details on The Quincunx
It must have been late autumn of that year, and probably it was towards dusk for the sake of being less conspicuous. And yet a meeting between two professional gentlemen representing the chief branche...
Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, poet, and playwright writing in the mid 19th century. His writing was very popular; consisting of 27 novels, 50 short stories, 15 plays and over 100 poems. His best-known works were The Woman in White, The Moon... More details on Armadale
The evening shadows were beginning to gather over the quiet little German town, and the diligence was expected every minute. Before the door of the principal inn, waiting the arrival of the first visi...
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall challenged the prevailing morals of the Victorian era. Especially shocking, at the time, was Helen's slamming of her bedroom door in the face of her husband, thereby overturning the sexual politics. It is considered to be ... More details on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
'My dear Gilbert, I wish you would try to be a little more amiable,' said my mother one morning after some display of unjustifiable ill-humour on my part. 'You say there is nothing the matter with you...
The complex story of a notorious law-suit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of 19th-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the corruption of the legal... More details on Bleak House
LONDON. MICHAELMAS TERM lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the fac...
The women of the small country town of Cranford live in genteel poverty, resolutely refusing to embrace change, while the dark clouds of urbanization and the advance of the railway hover threateningly on the horizon. In their simple, well-ordered liv... More details on Cranford
In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappea...
Caught in the howling turmoil of hurricane and tidal wave, a young gentleman merchant named Robinson Crusoe was flung onto the shore of a deserted tropical island. His ship-destroyed. His crew-dead. His location-unknown. The only human across the oce... More details on Robinson Crusoe
I WAS BORN IN the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, a...
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It has been described as the first modern detective story; Poe referred to it as one of his "tales of ratiocination". C. Auguste Dupin is a ma... More details on The Murders in the Rue Morgue
“The apartment was in the wildest disorder, the furniture broken and thrown about in all directions. There was only one bedstead; and from this the bed had been removed, and thrown into the middle of ...