The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen's best-known book. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human motivations. In this piercing story of innocence betrayed set in the thirties, the orphaned Portia is stranded in the sophisticated and politely treacherous...

The lives of two friends are contrasted in Edwardian London. Katharine Hillbery is the bored, frustrated granddaughter of an eminent English poet. She lives at her parents' home and is engaged to a prig who exemplifies the stultifying life from which she wishes to be free, until she meets a possible avenue of escape in the person of Ralph Denham. Mary Dathcet, on the other hand, represents an alternative to marriage -- she has been to college, lives...

A fading English finishing school is about to get a twenty-first-century makeover thanks to business-savvy Betsy Phillimore. But Betsy may have bitten off more than she can chew for she must first win over the school's snobby headmistress and its handsome but risk-averse treasurer. Returning to London also means facing her own unfinished business, as she crosses paths with her sexy girlhood crush ... and blowing the dust off clues to a lifelong mystery:...

Rose Macaulay was a fascinating and influential British writer, known for her wit and intellect. She wrote numerous novels, essays and biographies, and she was highly regarded for her versatility as a writer. Her works often explored themes of social change, women's rights and the complexities of human relationships. She had a unique ability to capture the essence of her characters and the world they inhabited, making her a much-admired figure in...

A darkly comic novel about a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, set against the backdrop of a London awash with faithless lovers, cutthroat strivers, and so-called friends One day successful young journalist and dedicated urbanite Rosa Lane sends her boss an e-mail that says "I quit" and then walks out of her job. She can't explain why-not to Liam, who's lived with her for years; not to her friends; not to her anxious, recently widowed father....

"Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of...

A tale of family secrets and the damaging corruption of the British legal system from the author of Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. In Bleak House, Charles Dickens not only pries apart the stultifying and ponderous conduct and contracts of British moneyed society, but also takes specific aim at an English judicial system in desperate need of modernization and reform. Featuring the voice of Esther Summerson-Dickens's only female narrator-the story...

In the early years of the Victorian age, a newly literate class of readers turned to "penny dreadfuls" for escapist fun. Blood-curdling tales, published in installments and costing only a penny, offered gripping episodes of romance, mystery, and horror. The notorious penny dreadful Sweeney Todd: The String of Pearls recounts a young woman's desperate search for her missing sailor sweetheart―a quest that ends in a Fleet Street barber shop, where...