Books in the Wordsworth Classics series

A Room of One's Own has become a classic feminist essay; The Voyage Out is highly significant as her first novel.

Richard II is one of Shakespeare's finest works: lucid, eloquent, and boldly structured. It can be seen as a tragedy, or a historical play, or a political drama, or as one part of a vast dramatic cycle which helped to generate England's national identity.

Richard III is one of the finest of Shakespeare's historical dramas. Although it has a huge cast, Richard himself, gleefully wicked, charismatically Machiavellian, always dominates the play.

This volume unites four of Wells' liveliest and most engaging tales of the strange evolution and behaviour of animals - including human beings. The Island of Doctor Moreau is followed by three fantastic yet chillingly plausible short stories of human-animal encounters.

Widely regarded as one of Edith Wharton's greatest achievements, The Age of Innocence is not only subtly satirical, but also a sometimes dark and disturbing comedy of manners in its exploration of the 'eternal triangle' of love.

Each of these short stories was written specifically for Christmas. They combine concern for social ills with the myths and memories of childhood and traditional Christmas spirit-lore. The stories include "A Christmas Carol", "The Chimes", "The Battle of Life" and "The Cricket on the Hearth".

This book has long been celebrated as one of Shakespeare's popular comedies. It describes the central relationship, between Benedick and Beatrice, which is combative until love prevails.

Wessex Tales was the first collection of Hardy's short stories, and they reflect the experience of a novelist at the height of his powers.

Rich with biographical echoes, this novel reveals the emergence of the schematic ironies which characterise the author's later works

An immediate best-seller on publication, Ben Hur remains a dazzling achievement by any standards. A thoroughly exhilarating tale of betrayal, revenge and salvation, it is the only novel that ranks with Uncle Tom's Cabin as a genuine American folk possession.

Tolstoy wrote many masterly short stories, and this volume contains four of the longest and best in distinguished translations that have stood the test of time.

With an Introduction and Notes by Adam Roberts, Royal Holloway, University of London.The product of more than a decade's continuous work (1598-1611), Chapman's translation of Homer's great poem of war is amagnificent testimony to the power of The Iliad. In muscular, onward-rolling verse Chapman retells the story of Achilles, the great warrior, and his terrible wrath before the walls of besieged Troy, and the destruction it wreaks on both Greeks and Trojans.Chapman regarded the translation of this epic, and of Homer's Odyssey (also available in Wordsworth Editions) as his life's work, and dedicated himself to capturing the 'soul' of the poem.Swinburne praised the resulting translation for its 'romantic and sometimes barbaric grandeur, its freshness, strength, and inexhaustible fire', qualities that reflect the grandeur, fire and brutality of the original poem. This new edition includes a critical introduction and extensive notes, rendering Chapman's extraordinary poetic masterpiece accessible to modern readers.

The novel is set in Wessex during the Napoleonic Wars. It interweaves a romantic love story of the rivalry of two brothers for the hand of the heroine Anne Garland. It also contains elements of sadness and even tragedy.

Explains about three generations of the Brangwen family of Nottinghamshire from the 1840s to the early years of the twentieth century. This framework is with the passional lives of author's characters as he explores the pressures that determine their lives, using a religious symbolism in which the 'rainbow' of the title is his unifying motif.

Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. This book contains vivid incident - pursuits through wild terrain, skirmishes - but reflects also on the interaction between colonists and native peoples. Through the character of Hawkeye, it questions practises of the American frontier and eclipse of cultures.

With an Introduction and Notes by Keith Wren, University of Kent at Canterbury. Translation by James Carroll Beckwirth (1899).Set in 1482, Victor Hugo's powerful novel of 'imagination, caprice and fantasy' is a meditation on love, fate, architecture and politics, as well as a compelling recreation of the medieval world at the dawn of the modern age.In a brilliant reworking of the tale of Beauty and the Beast, Hugo creates a host of unforgettable characters - amongst them, Quasimodo, the hunchback of the title, hopelessly in love with the gypsy girl Esmeralda, the satanic priest Claude Frollo, Clopin Trouillefou, king of the beggars, and Louis X1, King of France. Over the entire novel, both literally and symbolically, broods the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.Vivid characters and memorable set-piece action scenes combine to bring the past to life in this story of love, lust, betrayal, doom and redemption.

"The Turn of the Screw" is the classic ghost story for which James is most remembered. Set in a country house, it is a chilling tale of the supernatural. "The Aspern Papers" is a tale of Americans in Europe, cleverly evoking the drama of comedie humaine against the settings of a Venetian palace.

These two fascinating sets of stories, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes and His Last Bow, make a glorious farewell to the greatest detective of them all and his erstwhile companion, Dr Watson.

Describes the journey made as a wager by the Victorian gentleman Phileas Fogg, who succeeds - but only just - in circling the globe within eighty days. Fogg's obsession with his timetable is complemented by versatility of his French manservant, Passepartout, whose talent for getting into scrapes brings colour to the race against time.

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading.This simple and haunting story captures the transcience of life and its surrounding emotions.To the Lighthouse is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. It is based on her own early experiences, and while it touches on childhood and children's perceptions and desires, it is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships, marriage and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War.

Love and hate, loyalty and treachery, cruelty and self-sacrifice: all these contend in a tempestuous drama which has become an enduring classic of the world's literature.

Set in the heart of the Wessex, this book charts the rise and downfall of a single 'man of character'. It's moving and contrived narrative is Shakespearian in its force, and features some of the author's episodes and passages of description.

Follows lives of the beautiful but spoiled Gwendolene Harleth and selfless yet alienated Daniel Deronda, as they search for personal and vocational fulfilment and sympathetic relationship. Set in the degenerate English aristocratic society of the 1860s, this book charts their search for meaningful lives against a background of imperialism.

Transplanted to Europe from her native America, Isabel Archer has candour, beauty, intelligence, an independent spirit and a marked enthusiasm for life. An unexpected inheritance apparently gives her freedom, but despite her natural advantages she makes one error of judgement and the result is genuinely tragic.

Contains tales that tenderly re-create a vanishing rural world and scrutinise the repressions of fin-de-siecle bourgeois life. This book contains tales and sketches that possess the wealth of description, the portrayal of the quaint lore of Wessex, the 'Chaucerian' humour and characterisation, the shrewd and critical psychology.

Set in 1859 at the moment when the Russian autocratic state began to move hesitantly towards social and political reform, this novel explores the conflict between the liberal-minded fathers of Russian reformist sympathies and their free-thinking intellectual sons whose revolutionary ideology threatened the stability of the state.

Educated beyond her station, Grace Melbury returns to the woodland village of little Hintock and cannot marry her intended, Giles Winterborne. Her alternative choice proves disastrous.

Henry V is the most famous and influential of Shakespeare's history plays. Its powerful patriotic rhetoric has resounded down the ages.

On a poor farm near Starkfield in western Massachusetts, Ethan Frome struggles to wrest a living from the land, unassisted by his whining and hypochondriacal wife Zeena. When Zeena's young cousin Mattie Silver is left destitute, the only place she can go is Ethan's farm.