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"Miles Franklin began the candid, passionate, and contrary My Brilliant Career when she was only sixteen, intending it to be the Australian answer to Jane Eyre. But the book she produced--a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about a young girl hungering for life and love in the outback--so scandalized her country upon its appearance in 1901 that she insisted it not be published again until ten years after her death"--Publisher.
2) Ann Veronica
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Ann Veronica is a New Woman novel by H.G. Wells. Ann Veronica describes the rebellion of Ann Veronica Stanley, "a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty," against her middle-class father's stern patriarchal rule. The novel dramatizes the contemporary problem of the New Woman. It is set in Victorian era London and environs, except for an Alpine excursion. Ann Veronica offers vignettes of the Women's suffrage movement in Great Britain and features a chapter...
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Follows the fortunes of two families in nineteenth century rural England. At its core are family relationships father, daughter and step-mother, father and sons, father and step-daughter all tested and strained by the romantic entanglements that ensue. Despite its underlying seriousness, the prevailing tone is one of comedy. Gaskell vividly portrays the world of the late 1820 s and the forces of change within it, and her vision is always humane and...
4) Adam Bede
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Arthur's seduction of an innocent, young country girl results in remorse, suffering, and regret.
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"Set in the magical Wessex landscape so familiar from Thomas Hardy's early work, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is unique among his great novels for the intense feeling that he lavished upon his heroine, Tess, a pure woman betrayed by love. Hardy poured all of his profound empathy for both humanity and the rhythms of natural life into this story of her beauty, goodness, and tragic fate. In so doing, he created a character who, like Emma Bovary and Anna...
7) Middlemarch
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"Instead of choosing to wed a wealthy landowner and settle for a comfortable life, Dorothea Brooke decides to marry Edward Casaubon -- a dull scholar who is her senior by a few decades. Dorothea hopes the union will afford her with the opportunity to share in her husband's intellectual pursuits, but even her best efforts can't save the disastrous marriage. Meanwhile, idealistic doctor Tertius Lydgate has progressive ideas about the medical field,...
8) Daisy Miller
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The story of a young American woman traveling in Europe who clashes with American expatriates in Rome.
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When the miller Mr. Tulliver becomes entangled in lawsuits, he sets off a chain of events that will profoundly affect the lives of his family and bring into conflict his passionate daughter Maggie with her inflexible but adored brother Tom. As she grows older, Maggie's discovery of romantic love draws her once more into a struggle to reconcile familial and moral claims with her own desires. Strong-willed, compassionate, and intensely loyal, Maggie...
10) [Mansfield Park]
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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. This new edition places Mansfield Park in...
11) Northanger Abbey
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"A timeless classic, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is both a coming-of-age story and a parody of the Gothic novels of the nineteenth century. Catherine Morland is destined to be the heroine of her own life story as she navigates friendships and romantic relationships, and as she learns to let go of childish notions of fantasy regarding the lives of others. Held from publication for more than a decade, this story was an instant success when it was...
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Washington Square (1881), by Henry James, tells the story of Catherine Sloper, the plain, obedient daughter of the widowed, well-to-do Dr. August Sloper of Washington Square. When a handsome, feckless man-about-town proposes to Catherine, her father forbids the marriage because he believes the man to be after Catherine's fortune and future inheritance. The conflict between father, daughter, and suitor provokes consequences in the lives of all three...
13) At fault
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In rural Louisiana after Reconstruction, Therese Lafirme, a thirty-year-old widow, falls in love with David Hosmer, but rejects his marriage proposal because of her religious opposition to divorce.
14) Bleak House
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Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...
15) Quicksand
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"Helga's mother is white, and her father is black--and absent. Ostracized throughout her lonely childhood for her dark skin, Helga spends her adult life seeking acceptance. Everywhere she goes--the American South, Harlem, even Demark--she feels oppressed. Socially, economically, and psychologically, Helga struggles against the "quicksand" of classism, racism, and sexism"--Back cover.
16) North and south
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Moving from the industrial riots of discontented millworkers through to the unsought passions of a middle-class woman, and from religious crises of conscience to the ethics of naval mutiny, it poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Through the story of Margaret Hale, the middle-class southerner who moves to the northern industrial town of Milton, Gaskell skilfully explores issues of class and gender in the...
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One of the greatest mystery thrillers ever written, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White was a phenomenal bestseller in the 1860s, achieving even greater success than works by Dickens, Collins's friend and mentor. Full of surprise, intrigue, and suspense, this vastly entertaining novel continues to enthrall readers today. The story begins with an eerie midnight encounter between artist Walter Hartright and a ghostly woman dressed all in white who seems...
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"When her great-grandmother goes missing along with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights, Ohio, Nursing Home, Lenore's life is thrown into chaos. Featuring an insanely jealous boss and a cockatiel that quotes Auden and the King James Bible, Lenore's quest to find her great-grandmother against daunting odds cleverly moves into an exploration of the paradoxes of language, storytelling, and reality." -- inside blurb.
19) Little women
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"For generations, children around the world have come of age with Louisa May Alcott's March girls: hardworking eldest sister Meg, headstrong, impulsive Jo, timid Beth, and precocious Amy. With their father away at war, and their loving mother Marmee working to support the family, the four sisters have to rely on one another for support as they endure the hardships of wartime and poverty. We witness the sisters growing up and figuring out what role...
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This classic novel tells the story, in letters, of the beautiful and virtuous Clarissa Harlowes pursuit and abduction by the rake Robert Lovelace. The epistolary structure allows Richardson to create layered and fully realized characters, as well as an intriguing uncertainty about the reliability of the various narrators. As a heroine, Clarissa is both rational and passionate, self-sacrificing and defiant, and her tragic story has gripped readers...