Gemma Barder
6) Persuasion
When she was young and beautiful Anne Elliot fell in love with a dashing, but poor naval officer. Her family considered him beneath her and persuaded her to break off the match. Eight years later, when the novel begins, Anne is well past the bloom of her youth. Until Wentworth, now a celebrated captain, returns to the area to court her young neighour. Anne begins to slowly bloom a second time, though she hardly dares hope that he will return to
...Fanny Price is born to a poor family, but is sent to her mother's rich relations to be brought up with her cousins. There she is treated as an inferior by all except her cousin Edmund, whose kindness towards her earns him her steadfast love. Fanny is quiet and obedient and does not come into her own until her elder cousins leave the estate following a scandalous play put on in their father's absence. Fanny's loyalty and love is tested by the beautiful
...9) Emma
An American heiress newly arrived in Europe, Isabel Archer does not look to a man to furnish her with her destiny; instead she desires, with grace and courage, to find it herself. Two eligible suitors approach her and are refused in the name of personal freedom. It is in Rome, however, that Isabel becomes utterly captivated by the languid charms of Gilbert Osmond. To him, she represents a superior prize worth at least seventy thousand pounds;...
11) Fathers and Sons
Clashes and conflicts between fathers and sons are a story as old as humanity itself. Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev uses the turbulence of familial relations as a symbolic lens through which to explore the changing of the ideological guard in his native country. Turgenev's best-known work, Fathers and Sons is widely regarded as the first Russian novel to gain prominence and critical acclaim in Western literary circles.
13) Oblomov
17) Rip Van Winkle
18) Eugene Onegin
"A moving, vital testament to one of slavery's 'many thousand gone' who retained his humanity in the bowels of degradation." — Saturday ReviewBorn a free man in New York State in 1808, Solomon Northup was kidnapped in Washington, DC, in 1841. He spent the next 12 harrowing years of his life as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. During this time he was frequently abused and...