Jane Austen’s earliest known serious work, Lady Susan is a short, epistolary novel that portrays a woman bent on the exercise of her own powerful mind and personality to the point of social self-destruction.Lady Susan, a clever and ruthless widow, determines that her daughter is going to marry a man whom both detest. She sets her own sights on her sister-in-law’s brother, all the while keeping an old affair simmering on the back burner.But people refuse to play the roles as...

David Wilson has earned the unfortunate nickname "Pudd'nhead" from his fellow townspeople, who fail to understand his combination of wisdom and eccentricity. However, he is eventually able to redeem himself by simultaneously solving a murder mystery and a case of transposed identities.Two children, a white boy and a mulatto, are born on the same day. Roxy, mother of the mulatto and a slave, is given charge of the children; in fear that her son will be sold, she switches the babies....

This two-part adult fairytale by the author of The Secret Garden combines a charming Cinderella tale with an ironic look at class structure and the Edwardian marriage market in turn-of-the-century London.Emily Fox-Seton is a simple but good-hearted woman struggling to make ends meet while maintaining the dignity of one distantly related to the aristocracy. The Marquis of Walderhurst is an awkward but eligible bachelor being comically pursued by a pageant of unmarried ladie...

This timeless collection charted a new stylistic path for modern fiction. Through twenty-two connected short stories, Sherwood Anderson looks into the lives of the inhabitants of a small town in the American heartland. These psychological portraits of the sensitive and imaginative of Winesburg's population are seen through the eyes of a young reporter-narrator, George Willard. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligac...