An entangling narrative about love, revenge and despair. The novel revolves around the life of the protagonist whose life is centered on avenging the death of his father. The shattering of childhood fantasies and the anguish that follows is captured in a heart-rending manner. Captivating!

"In a Glass Darkly", which was first published in 1872, collects together five classic gothic horror and mystery short stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. In "Green Tea" we have the story of Jennings, a clergyman who believes he is being followed by a demon in the form of a monkey. In "The Familiar" we have the tale of a sea captain who is stalked by 'the watcher'. "Mr. Justice Harbottle", the third installment of the work, relates the plight of Elijah Harbottle, who finds himself under attack...

The pieces in Wilkie Collins's My Miscellanies were first published in Household Words and All the Year Round. The collection includes Memoirs of an Adopted Son, the tale of an audacious mugger and the myth of his paranormal birth and demise. The Poisoned Meal is a true story about Marie-Francoise who is wrongly charged with murder. A Queen's Revenge, My Black Mirror, and The Queen's Revenge are also included in the anthology.

Some of Honore de Balzac's best writing focuses on the frustrations and passions of women trapped in unhappy marriages. In the novella "The Deserted Woman," the Vicomtesse de Beauseant is trapped, but it is partially a trap of her own making. Abandoned by her lover and estranged from her husband, she contemplates her limited options.

At Paris there are almost always two separate parties going on at every ball and rout. First, an official party, composed of the persons invited, a fashionable and much-bored circle. Each one grimaces for his neighbor’s eye; most of the younger women are there for one person only; when each woman has assured herself that for that one she is the handsomest woman in the room, and that the opinion is perhaps shared by a few others, a few insignificant phrases are exchanged, as...

This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘Madeleine Ferat’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of Emile Zola’.Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Zola includes original annotations and illustrations relatin...

Popular novel, first published in 1921.

In Notre Coeur (often rendered in English as A Woman's Pastime), Guy de Maupassant turns from the compact cruelty of the short story to the psychological breadth of the late nineteenth-century novel. The book studies the elegant, perilous world of Parisian salons, where wit, vanity, flirtation, and emotional exhaustion become instruments of social power. Its central drama—an intelligent man's entanglement with a charming, elusive woman—unfolds in a restrained yet penetrating realist style,...

Excerpt: "When a child, I went to confession. How often have I wished that I were still the lad who came at five o'clock into the chapel of our school, the cold empty chapel, with its white-washed walls, its benches on which our places were numbered, its harmonium, its Holy Family, its blue ceiling dotted with stars. We were taken to this chapel in tens. When it came to my turn to kneel in one of the two spaces on either side of the central seat of the priest, my heart would beat violently...

Gustave Droz was a French novelist known for his works that explored the complexities of human relationships, often with a focus on the interactions between men and women in society. Two of his notable works are "Monsieur, Madame" and "Volume 01.""Monsieur, Madame" is not a single novel but rather a collection of short stories and essays that deal with the various aspects of married life and relationships between husbands and wives. These pieces provide insight into the dynamics of romanti...

In Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's work In a Glass Darkly: Carmilla, the reader is presented with a gothic narrative that subverts traditional gender roles, exploring themes such as the abjection of female desire and heteronormative anxieties. Through its use of the supernatural and horror aesthetic, Le Fanu's novella illustrates how patriarchal structures attempt to control female sexuality.

The author of 'The Woman in White' and of 'No Name' has had reprinted and published a collection of articles contributed by him to Household Words, and perhaps to other periodicals. The two papers which will attract most attention are probably those entitled respectively, "To Think, or Be Thought For," and "Dramatic Grub-street," inasmuch as upon their first appearance they provoked both private and public remonstrance, and they are now reprinted because Mr. Collins has seen a reason to ab...