Felix Holt is an endearing but opinionated Radical, who returns to Treby Magna just as the wealthy landowner, Harold Transome, announces his bid for election. It marks the beginning of a tumultuous time as unethical players seek to undermine the voting process. Treby Magna is a small English community that's home to Felix Holt and Harold Transome. Both men have returned after stints abroad with Harold eager to elevate his status in the political...

A young governess turns up at a country estate in Essex to care for Miles and Flora, two young orphans left in care of their absentee uncle. Soon after her tenure begins, the governess begins to see strangers walking the grounds, and interacting with the siblings in odd and disturbing ways. The governess begins to feel they are not wholly human-but rather are ghosts haunting Miles and Flora, and their influence upon the children has tragic consequences....

Unburdened by the material necessities of the more fortunate, the denizens of Cannery Row discover rewards unknown in more traditional society. Henry the painter sorts through junk lots for pieces of wood to incorporate into the boat he is building, while the girls from Dora Floodrsquo;s bordello venture out now and then to enjoy a bit of sunshine. Lee Chong stocks his grocery with almost anything a man could want, and Doc, a young marine biologist...

Twenty-seven-year old Anne Elliot is Austen's most adult heroine. Eight years before the story proper begins, she is happily betrothed to a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, but she precipitously breaks off the engagement when persuaded by her friend Lady Russell.

From her home ground, her father's comfortably middle-class living in Hampshire and her aunt's establishment in Harley Street, Margaret is exiled to the ugly northern industrial town of Milton. Surprisingly, her social consciousness awakens. It is intensified by a relationship with the local mill-owner, Thornton, that combines passionate attraction with fierce opposition. The novel explores the exploitation of the working class, linking the plight...

Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children; at odds with his vain, successful father; failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as “the type that loses the girl”); and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day he reviews his past mistakes...

Shaped by a novelist's imagination, Elizabeth Gaskell's admiring portrait of her friend (and author of JANE EYRE) Charlotte Bronte, as well as her descriptions of the people and events that caused Bronte pain or suffering reads much like the life of fictional characters of their early 19th-century time--extreme self-denial, coping with sickness and death and surviving through the strength of religious faith and moral integrity.