Books published by Wordsworth Editions Ltd

An expose of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally-starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-19th century, Agnes Grey has a power and poignancy which mark it out as a landmark work of literature

David Stuart Davies' selection of the best stories of the master sleuth

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.

During Emily's life only seven of her 1775 poems were published. This collection of her work shows her breadth of vision and a passionate intensity and awe for life, love, nature, time and eternity. Once branded an eccentric Dickinson is now regarded as a major American poet.

Although Tennyson has often been characterized as an austere, bearded patriarch and laureate of the Victorian age, his poems still have relevance. His mastery of rhyme, metre, imagery and mood communicate their dark, sensuous and sometimes morbid messages.

The Professor is Charlotte Bronte's first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and consciousness of a man, William Crimsworth

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr John Bowen, Department of English, University of Keele.Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz).Martin Chuzzlewit is Charles Dickens' comic masterpiece about which his biographer, Forster, noted that it marked a crucial phase in the author's development as he began to delve deeper into the 'springs of character'.Old Martin Chuzzlewit, tormented by the greed and selfishness of his family, effectively drives his grandson, young Martin, to undertake a voyage to America. It is a voyage which will have crucial consequences not only for young Martin, but also for his grandfather and his grandfather's servant, Mary Graham with whom young Martin is in love. The commercial swindle of the Anglo-Bengalee company and the fraudulent Eden Land Corporation have a topicality in our own time.This strong sub-plot shows evidence of Dickens' mastery of crime where characters such as the criminal Jonas Chuzzlewit, the old nurse Mrs Gamp, and the arch-hypocrite Seth Pecksniff are the equal to any in his other great novels. Generations of readers have also delighted in Dickens' wonderful description of the London boarding-house - 'Todgers'.

This work contains Artistotle's views on what makes a good human life. It has served as an influence on the history of ideas and offers insights into the human condition.

This collection contains the poetic works of Walt Whitman. These poems reflect the vitality of a new nation and the vastness of its lands. They combine autobiographical, sociological and religious themes but did not conform to previous genres.

With an Introduction and Notes by Katherine McGowran.Christina Rossetti is widely regarded as the most considerable woman poet in England before the twentieth century. No reading of nineteenth century poetry can be complete without attention to this prolific and popular poet. Rosetti's inner life dominates her poetry, exploring loss and unattainable hope.Her divine poems have a freshness and toughness of thought, while many of her love poems are erotic, and as often express love for women as for men. The varied threads of Rossetti's concerns are drawn together in what is perhaps her greatest poem, the strange and ambiguous 'Goblin Market'.

The sonnets in this collection divide into two parts; the first 126 are addressed to a fair youth for whom the poet has an obsessive love and the second chronicles his love for the notorious "Dark Lady". In addition to the sonnets, this volume includes two lengthy poems on classical themes.

This edition contains all Shelley's poetry, from his juvenilia to his great works such as "The Revolt of Islam" and "Ode to the West Wind", and his only completed verse drama "The Cenci", a melodramatic Venetian tale of incest, murder and revenge.

This volume comprises the complete poetic works of Byron. As well as including such works as "Childe Harold", "Don Juan", "The Two Foscari", "The Lament of Tasso" and "The Vision of Judgement", it also contains his shorter lyrical poems.

This collection comprises the works of John Keats, one of the greatest English poets and contemporary of Byron and Shelley. The collection includes "Endymion", "Lamia", "Isabella" and "Hyperion".

This work comprises a collection of the poetic works of Thomas Hardy. Hardy's poetry spanned over 50 years from the last half of the 19th century to the period after World War I, and ranges from pessimistic works to those which were witty and fanciful.

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.

The protagonist, the 'cave-man in a lounge suit', is the maddening, irascible and fascinating Professor George Edward Challenger. This volume includes adventures he faced such as that high above the Amazon rain forest in "The Lost World" and the challenges of "The Land of Mist".

Presents a combination of the sentimental, the grotesque and the socially concerned, this novel tells the story of pursuit and courage, which sets the downtrodden and the plucky against the malevolent and the villainous.

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.

With a new Introduction by Professor Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D.This selection of a hundred of O. Henry's succinct tales displays the range, humour and humanity of a perennially popular short-story writer.Here Henry gives a richly colourful and exuberantly entertaining panorama of social life, ranging from thieves to tycoons, from the streets of New York to the prairies of Texas.These stories are famed for their 'trick endings' or 'twists in the tail': repeatedly the plot twirls adroitly, compounding ironies. Indeed, O. Henry's cunning plots surpass those of the ingenious rogues he creates. His style is genial, lively and witty, displaying a virtuoso's command of language and allusion.This great collection offers delights for the mind, imagination and emotions.

The central figure of this novel is the returning "native", Clym Yeobright, and his love for the beautiful but capricious Eustacia Vye.

An analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate. This title includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.

The diary is that of someone who acknowledges that he is not a "somebody" - Charles Pooter, a clerk in the city of London, chronicles with often hilarious detail the everyday life of the lower middle classes during the great Victorian Age.

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.

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.

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.

Whilst cleaning a chimney, Tom, emerges in the bedroom of Ellie, who mistakes him for a thief. He runs away, and hot and bothered he slips into a cooling stream, falls asleep and becomes a Water Baby. After an arduous quest to the Other-end-of-Nowhere he achieves his heart's desire.

Includes Shakespeare's best-loved tales, comic and tragic, rewritten for a younger audience. This title contains the delightful pen-and-ink drawings of Arthur Rackham.

When the Cuthberts send to the orphanage for a boy to help them at their farm Green Gables, they are astonished when a talkative little girl steps off the train. Anne, an incurable romantic causes chaos at Green Gables and at the village, but her good nature endears her to the residents.