Schedoni, a sinister monk, contrives to prevent the marriage of Vincentio di Vivaldi to Ellena Rosalba, at the request of Vincentio's mother.

The second novel in Trollope's Palliser series, Phineas Finn's engaging plot embraces matters as diverse as reform, the position of women, the Irish question, and the conflict between integrity and ambition. Through the engaging figure of the handsome Irishman Phineas Finn, Trollope explores the realities of political life, and the clash between compromise and conviction, that is as topical today as it was in the 1860s. In his introduction, Simon...

Compelling in its imaginative power and bold naturalism, the novel opens in the autumn of 1812, when a mysterious woman who calls herself Helen Graham seeks refuge at the desolate moorland mansion of Wildfell Hall. Bronte's enigmatic heroine becomes the object of gossip and jealousy as neighbors learn she is escaping from an abusive marriage and living under an assumed name. A daring story that exposed the dark brutality of Victorian chauvinism, The...

"Lucy Snowe, in flight from an unhappy past, leaves England and finds work as a teacher in Madame Beck's school in 'Villette'. Strongly drawn to the fiery autocratic schoolmaster Monsieur Paul Emanuel, Lucy is compelled by Madame Beck's jealous interference to assert her right to love and to be loved." "Based in part on Charlotte Bronte's experience in Brussels ten years earlier, Villette (1853) is coloured by her sadness and isolation after the deaths...