The House of Mirth Edith Wharton http://feedbooks.com/book/98 urn:isbn:1600962203 en 1905 Novels The House of Mirth (1905), by Edith Wharton, is a novel about New York socialite Lily Bart attempting to secure a husband and a place in rich society. It is one of the first novels of manners in American literature. This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70 and in the USA. http://feedbooks.com/book/98.png http://feedbooks.com/book/98.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/98.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/98.mobi Ethan Frome Edith Wharton http://feedbooks.com/book/170 urn:isbn:0735101191 en 1911 Novels Set against the bleak winter landscape of New England, Ethan Frome is the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver. In the playing out of this short novel's powerful and engrossing drama, Edith Wharton constructed her least characteristic and most celebrated book. This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70 and in the USA. http://feedbooks.com/book/170.png http://feedbooks.com/book/170.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/170.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/170.mobi A Room with a View E. M. Forster http://feedbooks.com/book/2068 urn:isbn:0553213237 en 1908 Novels Romance This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of Surrey, England. A charming young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a fellow Britisher when she witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza. Attracted to this man, George Emerson—who is entirely unsuitable and whose father just may be a Socialist—Lucy is soon at war with the snobbery of her class and her own conflicting desires. Back in England, she is courted by a more acceptable, if stifling, suitor and soon realizes she must make a startling decision that will decide the course of her future: she is forced to choose between convention and passion. This work was published before 1923 and is in the public domain in the USA only. http://feedbooks.com/book/2068.png http://feedbooks.com/book/2068.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/2068.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/2068.mobi Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf http://feedbooks.com/book/1231 urn:isbn:0156628708 en 1925 Novels Mrs Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. Mrs Dalloway continues to be one of Woolf's best-known novels. Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in time, and in and out of the characters' minds, to construct a complete image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure. This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+50. http://feedbooks.com/book/1231.png http://feedbooks.com/book/1231.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/1231.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/1231.mobi The Portrait of a Lady Henry James http://feedbooks.com/book/413 urn:isbn:0375759190 en 1881 Novels Romance One of the great heroines of American literature, Isabel Archer, journeys to Europe in order to, as Henry James writes in his 1908 Preface, “affront her destiny.” James began The Portrait of a Lady without a plot or subject, only the slim but provocative notion of a young woman taking control of her fate. The result is a richly imagined study of an American heiress who turns away her suitors in an effort to first establish—and then protect—her independence. But Isabel’s pursuit of spiritual freedom collapses when she meets the captivating Gilbert Osmond. “James’s formidable powers of observation, his stance as a kind of bachelor recorder of human doings in which he is not involved,” writes Hortense Calisher, “make him a first-class documentarian, joining him to that great body of storytellers who amass what formal history cannot.” This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70 and in the USA. http://feedbooks.com/book/413.png http://feedbooks.com/book/413.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/413.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/413.mobi To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf http://feedbooks.com/book/1234 urn:isbn:0156907399 en 1927 Novels To the Lighthouse (5 May 1927) is a novel by Virginia Woolf. A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, centering on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skillfully manipulates temporality and psychological exploration. To the Lighthouse follows and extends the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the prose can be winding and hard to follow. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls the power of childhood emotions and highlights the impermanence of adult relationships. One of the book's several themes is the ubiquity of transience. This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+50. http://feedbooks.com/book/1234.png http://feedbooks.com/book/1234.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/1234.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/1234.mobi Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray http://feedbooks.com/book/1469 urn:isbn:1593083653 en 1848 Novels “I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a year,” observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the wickedest—and most appealing—women in all of literature. Becky is just one of the many fascinating figures that populate William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, a wonderfully satirical panorama of upper-middle-class life and manners in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Scorned for her lack of money and breeding, Becky must use all her wit, charm and considerable sex appeal to escape her drab destiny as a governess. From London’s ballrooms to the battlefields of Waterloo, the bewitching Becky works her wiles on a gallery of memorable characters, including her lecherous employer, Sir Pitt, his rich sister, Miss Crawley, and Pitt’s dashing son, Rawdon, the first of Becky’s misguided sexual entanglements. Filled with hilarious dialogue and superb characterizations, Vanity Fair is a richly entertaining comedy that asks the reader, “Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?” http://feedbooks.com/book/1469.png http://feedbooks.com/book/1469.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/1469.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/1469.mobi The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde http://feedbooks.com/book/6 urn:isbn:0375751513 en 1891 Novels Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in 1890. Wilde was attacked for his decadence and corrupting influence, and a few years later the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, trials that resulted in his imprisonment. Of the book's value as autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, "Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be--in other ages, perhaps." http://feedbooks.com/book/6.png http://feedbooks.com/book/6.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/6.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/6.mobi Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert http://feedbooks.com/book/2042 urn:isbn:0192840398 en 1857 Novels Romance Madame Bovary scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857. And the story itself remains as fresh today as when it was first written, a work that remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society. It tells the tragic story of the romantic but empty-headed Emma Rouault. When Emma marries Charles Bovary, she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is an ordinary country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns. In her quest to realize her dreams she takes a lover, Rodolphe, and begins a devastating spiral into deceit and despair. And Flaubert captures every step of this catastrophe with sharp-eyed detail and a wonderfully subtle understanding of human emotions. http://feedbooks.com/book/2042.png http://feedbooks.com/book/2042.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/2042.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/2042.mobi Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen http://feedbooks.com/book/53 urn:isbn:0192804782 en 1811 Novels Romance Elinor and Marianne are two daughters of Mr. Dashwood by his second wife. They have a younger sister, Margaret, and an older half-brother named John. When their father dies, the family estate passes to John and the Dashwood women are left in reduced circumstances. Fortunately, a distant relative offers to rent the women a cottage on his property. The novel follows the Dashwood sisters to their new home, where they experience both romance and heartbreak. http://feedbooks.com/book/53.png http://feedbooks.com/book/53.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/53.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/53.mobi Great Expectations Charles Dickens http://feedbooks.com/book/70 urn:isbn:0192833596 en 1861 Novels Great Expectations is a novel by Charles Dickens first serialised in All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. It is regarded as one of his greatest and most sophisticated novels, and is one of his most enduringly popular, having been adapted for stage and screen over 250 times. Great Expectations is written in a semi-autobiographical style, and is the story of the orphan Pip, writing his life from his early days of childhood until adulthood. The story can also be considered semi-autobiographical of Dickens, like much of his work, drawing on his experiences of life and people. The action of the story takes place from Christmas Eve, 1812, when the protagonist is about seven years old, to the winter of 1840. http://feedbooks.com/book/70.png http://feedbooks.com/book/70.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/70.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/70.mobi Howards End E. M. Forster http://feedbooks.com/book/2071 urn:isbn:0486424545 en 1910 Novels The disregard of a dying woman's bequest, a girl's attempt to help an impoverished clerk, and the marriage of an idealist and a materialist — all intersect at an estate called Howards End. The fate of this country home symbolizes the future of England in an exploration of social, economic, and philosophical trends during the post-Victorian era. This work was published before 1923 and is in the public domain in the USA only. http://feedbooks.com/book/2071.png http://feedbooks.com/book/2071.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/2071.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/2071.mobi Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë http://feedbooks.com/book/135 urn:isbn:0553212583 en 1847 Novels Gothic Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë's only novel. It was first published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, and a posthumous second edition was edited by her sister Charlotte. The name of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors on which the story centres (as an adjective, wuthering is a Yorkshire word referring to turbulent weather). The narrative tells the tale of the all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted, love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and many around them. http://feedbooks.com/book/135.png http://feedbooks.com/book/135.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/135.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/135.mobi The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne http://feedbooks.com/book/1523 en 1850 Novels Romance Gothic The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, is an American novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and is generally considered to be his magnum opus. Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who gives birth after committing adultery, refuses to name the father, and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the novel, Hawthorne explores questions of grace, legalism, sin and guilt. http://feedbooks.com/book/1523.png http://feedbooks.com/book/1523.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/1523.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/1523.mobi Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë http://feedbooks.com/book/144 urn:isbn:1551111802 en 1847 Novels Romance Jane Eyre, the story of a young girl and her passage into adulthood, was an immediate commercial success at the time of its original publication in 1847. Its representation of the underside of domestic life and the hypocrisy behind religious enthusiasm drew both praise and bitter criticism, while Charlotte Brontë's striking expose of poor living conditions for children in charity schools as well as her poignant portrayal of the limitations faced by women who worked as governesses sparked great controversy and social debate. Jane Eyre, Brontë's best-known novel, remains an extraordinary coming-of-age narrative, and one of the great classics of literature. http://feedbooks.com/book/144.png http://feedbooks.com/book/144.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/144.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/144.mobi Anna Karenina Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy http://feedbooks.com/book/1487 urn:isbn:1593080271 en 1877 Novels Romance Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness. This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70 and in the USA. http://feedbooks.com/book/1487.png http://feedbooks.com/book/1487.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/1487.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/1487.mobi Lady Chatterley's Lover David Herbert Lawrence http://feedbooks.com/book/87 urn:isbn:0553212621 en 1928 Novels Sexuality Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence written in 1928. Printed privately in Florence in 1928, it was not printed in the United Kingdom until 1960 (other than in an underground edition issued by Inky Stephensen's Mandrake Press in 1929). Lawrence considered calling this book Tenderness at one time and made significant alterations to the original manuscript in order to make it palatable to readers. It has been published in three different versions. The publication of the book caused a scandal due to its explicit sex scenes, including previously banned four-letter words, and perhaps because the lovers were a working-class male and an aristocratic female. The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Ilkeston in Derbyshire where he lived for a while. According to some critics the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story. This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70. http://feedbooks.com/book/87.png http://feedbooks.com/book/87.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/87.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/87.mobi Little Women Louisa May Alcott http://feedbooks.com/book/139 urn:isbn:0517214628 en 1868 Novels Little Women or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888). Written and published in two parts in 1868 and 1869, the novel follows the lives of four sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March — and is loosely based on the author's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The first part of the book was an immediate commercial and critical success and prompted the composition of the book's second part, also a huge success. Both parts were first published as a single volume in 1880. The book is an unquestioned American classic. http://feedbooks.com/book/139.png http://feedbooks.com/book/139.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/139.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/139.mobi Mansfield Park Jane Austen http://feedbooks.com/book/358 urn:isbn:019280264X en 1814 Novels At the age of ten, Fanny Price leaves the poverty of her Portsmouth home to be brought up among the family of her wealthy uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, in the chilly grandeur of Mansfield Park. She gradually falls in love with her cousin Edmund, but when the dazzling and sophisticated Crawfords arrive, and amateur theatricals unleash rivalry and sexual jealousy, Fanny has to fight to retain her independence. http://feedbooks.com/book/358.png http://feedbooks.com/book/358.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/358.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/358.mobi Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure John Cleland http://feedbooks.com/book/84 urn:isbn:1840224177 en 1749 Novels Sexuality Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, popularly known as Fanny Hill, is a novel by John Cleland. Written in 1748 while Cleland was in debtor's prison in London, it is considered the first modern "erotic novel" in English, and has become a byword for the battle of censorship of erotica. http://feedbooks.com/book/84.png http://feedbooks.com/book/84.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/84.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/84.mobi