Elizabeth Klett
Life in the Iron Mills
This 1861 novella was the first published work by Rebecca Harding Davis: writer, social reformer, and pioneer of literary realism. It tell…
Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave
Aphra Behn was the first woman writer in England to make a living by her pen, and her novel Oroonoko was the first work published in English…
Crucial Instances
Crucial Instances is a captivating collection of short stories by Edith Wharton, published in 1901. In this anthology, Wharton explores the …
Emma (version 3)
Jane Austen famously described Emma Woodhouse, the title character of her 1815 novel, as "a heroine whom no-one but myself will much li…
What Maisie Knew
What Maisie Knew is a poignant exploration of childhood innocence amidst the turmoil of adult relationships. When young Maisie Farange is ca…
Olalla
"Olalla" was a "shilling shocker" written for the Christmas season in 1885, just before the publication of Stevenson's D…
The Marne: a tale of the war
American writer Edith Wharton is known for her novels of manners set in old New York; yet much of her adult life was spent in France. She li…
Quicksand
Quicksand is a 1928 novel by Nella Larsen, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance. It focuses on Helga Crane, a mixed-race woman who is a school…
Pauline's Passion and Punishment
Before she wrote Little Women and Little Men, Louisa, writing under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, had this `blood and thunder' thriller (as sh…
The Dead (version 2)
This novella is the final story in Joyce's collection Dubliners. It describes a Christmas party given by Kate and Julia Morkan, two elderly …
In Memoriam A.H.H.
In Memoriam is Tennyson's elegiac tribute to his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died in 1833 at the age of 22. Tennyson wrote this long poe…
The Waste Land (version 3)
The Waste Land is T. S. Eliot's Modernist masterpiece, first published in 1920. Rich in allusions to Shakespeare, Dante, Baudelaire, the Bib…
Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort
American novelist Edith Wharton was living in Paris when World War I broke out in 1914. She obtained permission to visit sites behind the li…
The House of the Vampire
The House of the Vampire is a 1907 novella that is a very unusual vampire story. A young writer comes under the powerful influence of a myst…
Ophelia, the Rose of Elsinore
This story is from Mary Cowden Clarke's multi-volume work The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, in which she imagined the early lives of c…
The Fifth Queen
The Fifth Queen invites listeners into the tumultuous world of Tudor England, where ambition and desire intertwine in the court of King Henr…
The Island
Written late in his career, Byron's narrative poem The Island tells the famous story of the mutiny on board the Bounty, and follows the muti…
News From Nowhere
News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialis…
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American to publish a book of poetry in 1773. Born in West Africa, she was sold into slavery at age s…
The Princess
The Princess is a serio-comic blank verse narrative poem, written by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1847. The poem tells the story of an hero…