At the heart of his 1861 novel Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (a novel Oliver Wendell Holmes later called his "medicated novel"), lies an analogy between original sin and genetic inheritance. Po... more »

Holmes's 1867 novelistic examination of how "inherited bodily aspects or habitudes" determine character from generation to generation.

The observations of a trip to Paris fifty years after his first visit as a student.

In this, the third series of Breakfast-Table conversations, a slight dramatic background shows off a few talkers and writers, aided by certain silent supernumeraries. The machinery is much like that... more »

A wry tale of temptation and triumph, Eliot described as "an admirable instance of the unexpected forms in which the great Nemesis hides herself."

The Waste Land, which has long been regarded as one of the fundamental texts of modernism. By combining poetic elements from many diverse sources with bits of popular culture and common speech linke... more »

There are evil neighborhoods of noise and evil neighborhoods of silence, and Eeldrop and Appleplex preferred the latter, as being the more evil.

All talk on modern poetry by people who know ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as ... more »

Certain of these poems first appeared in Poetry, Blast, Others, The Little Review, and Art and Letters. Contents: Gerontion; Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar; Sweeney Erect; A Cooking... more »

This collection of poems contains one of Eliot's first and most well-known poems, namely, the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, in which he examines, through the introspections of the narrator, the e... more »

Based on an 1839 boat trip Thoreau took with his brother from Concord, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire, and back, this classic of American literature is not only a vivid narrative of that j... more »

Paradise Lost is the greatest work of one of the most acclaimed poets in English literature. It has had a profound influence on Western culture, and has attracted a vast amount of critical commentar... more »

Paradise Regained demonstrates Milton's genius for fusing sense and sound, classicism and innovation, narrative and drama, fortifying not merely our sense of what is beautiful but what is human as w... more »

Many of the works created by the prolific poet John Milton.

A notorious success when it was first published in 1915, this collection of dramatic monologues by over 200 former inhabitants of the fictional town of Spoon River topples the myth of moral superior... more »

The Professor was the first novel that Charlotte Bronte completed. Rejected by the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846--Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights--it remained... more »

Arguably Bronte's most refined and deeply felt work, Villette draws on her experiences as a student in Brussels as well as her profound loneliness following the deaths of her three siblings. Lucy Sn... more »

Collection of Poems by the Bronte sisters.

George Eliot's Gothic story, published the same year as her staunchly realist novel, Adam Bede, continues her preoccupation with human communication and sympathy through the figure of the telepathic... more »

Originally published in Thackeray's Cornhill Magazine from 1860 to his retirement as editor in 1862, this series of essays was published as a single volume in 1863, the year of his death. Contents: ... more »

A set of Indian tales that first appeared in Macmillans Magazine. Contents: "The Finest Story in the World", With the Main Guard, Wee Willie Winkie, The Rout of the White Hussars, At Twenty-two, The... more »

Life's Handicap contains twenty-seven stories about the experience of the British in India. Contents: The Lang Men O' Larut, Reingelder and the German Flag, The Wandering Jew, Through the Fire, The ... more »

A Little Dinner at Timmins's is among the miscellaneous contributions to Punch, a political and topical verses magazine published from 1851-1854.

The satirical and entertaining memoirs of a Victorian footman by the author of Vanity Fair.

When an honest clergyman finds himself charged with financial impropriety by a Fleet Street tabloid, scandal, pathos, and humor result. This 1855 tale from the author's Barsetshire series features a... more »