John Harmon returns to England as his father's heir. Believed drowned under suspicious circumstances--a situation convenient to his wish for anonymity--John evaluates Bella Wilfer whom he must marry to secure his inheritance. The story is filled with colorful Victorian characters and incidents -- the faded aristocrats and parvenus gathered at the Veneering's dinner table, Betty Higden and her terror of the workhouse and the greedy plottings of Silas...

Charlotte Bronte's last and most autobiographical novel, Villette, explores the inner life of a lonely young Englishwoman, Lucy Snowe, who leaves an unhappy existence in England to become a teacher in the capital of a fictional European country. Drawn to the school's headmaster, Lucy must face the pain of unrequited love and the question of her place in society.

A powerful and courageous work of fiction, Hard Times looks at working conditions in a Victorian factory town in the industrial north of England. It's an extraordinary novel that considers how enslavement to systems at the expense of imagination and feeling can wreck human lives. This edition celebrates Charles Dickens' most openly campaigning novel, through which the author said he aimed to 'strike the heaviest blow in my power'. Hard Times explores...

The daughter of an imprisoned debtor suffers injustices of nineteenth-century English society.

A mysterious minister who never removes the black veil shrouding his face, an eccentric scientist who experiments with the fate of his friends, a cheerful tombstone carver who speaks the wisdom of the graveyard, these are but a few of the unusual New Englanders you'll meet in Twice-Told Tales

Set among the elegant brownstones of New York City and opulent country houses like gracious Bellomont on the Hudson, the novel creates a satiric portrayal of what Wharton herself called "a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers" with a precision comparable to that of Proust. And her brilliant and complex characterization of the doomed Lily Bart, whose stunning beauty and dependence on marriage for economic survival reduce her to a decorative object,...

Rejected by the man she loves when he discovers that her father will disinherit her if they marry, Catherine Sloper again meets Morris Townsend after the death of her forbidding and domineering parent

Originally published in 1902, this is a story of deceit and betrayal, as well as of forgiveness. Milly Theale is an heiress with a short time to live and a passion for experiencing life to its fullest. Merton Densher is the man she loves, and the magnificent, predatory Kate Croy is the woman he loves, and will conspire with against Millie.

A reprint of Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen's 1929 novel in which Irene, an African-American woman with a comfortable life, is disturbed by the return of a childhood friend, Clare, who has passed for white since adolescence and now wants to rejoin the African-American community.

The Ambassadors, by Henry James, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...