"From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognizably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers-from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched...

A Memoir of Jane Austen is the Austen family's memoir of the beloved 19th century English novelist. Written and compiled by Austen's nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen reveals the author as her family knew her, while at the same time protecting the author's privacy in keeping with the Victorian conventions of the time. A Memoir of Jane Austen did, however, reveal for the first time Austen's authorship of such classic stories...

The Argonauts are the gold seekers of 1849 and the years immediately following. These adventurers came from all quarters of the globe and all ranks of society, and they had in common only the possession of the strength and determination necessary to reach the new Colchis. Here they lived, at first, wholly free from the conventional restraints imposed by an organized society, and each man showed himself for what he was. Many of these primitive social...

A trio of semi-autobiographical novels, “Childhood”, “Boyhood”, and “Youth” portray a rich landowner's son and his growing realization of the gulf between himself and his family's peasants. Tolstoy's childlike perspective, leavened with adult understanding, weaves a universal tale of the emotions, confusions, and fears of a young boy as he begins to understand his place in society and his growing awareness of the world around him.

This 1878 volume in the English Men of Letters series explores the life of Edward Gibbon, author of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. According to a contemporary review by Mark Pattison in the Academy, "Future numbers of the series may imitate, they cannot surpass, the present specimen." A splendid perspective on the life of an intriguing man.

This biography of poet Edmund Spenser (c. 1552—1599), is an invaluable source for students of Spenser. Unparalleled in its information about one of the greatest poets in the English language, Church illuminates the life of a man who is best known for his epic poem “The Faerie Queene”, an adventure-filled tale that is also an allegory about living a moral, virtuous life.

A combination of social satire and science fiction, this novel presents the story of George Ponderovo, a young man who leaves college to help his Uncle Edward market a bogus medicine named Tono-Bungay.

An exotic, heartbreaking memoir that should finally earn Paula Fox, a distinguished novelist and children's book writer, the audience she has for decades deserved Paula Fox has long been acclaimed as one of America's most brilliant fiction writers. Borrowed Finery, her first book in nearly a decade, is an astonishing memoir of her highly unusual beginnings. Born in the twenties to nomadic, bohemian parents, Fox is left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage,...

A fascinating biography of one of the most famous poets in history: Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Written by famed historian and anthropologist Andrew Lang.

Oscar Wilde’s autobiographical work on suffering, self-realization, and the artistic process
De Profundis (Latin for “from the depths”) is Oscar Wilde’s reconciliation from a life full of pleasure. In 1891 the author began an intimate relationship with the young aristocrat Lord Alfred Douglas, known to his friends as Bosie. This affair led to speculations about Wilde’s sexuality just as his career was...