When best friends, Jack and Jill, tumble off their sled, their injuries cause them to be bedridden for many months. Their parents fill their days with the joys of Christmas preparations, a theatrical production and many other imaginative events.
The Turn of the Screw, originally published in 1898, is a gothic ghost story novella written by Henry James.
Due to its ambiguous content, it became a favourite text of academics who subscribe to New Criticism. The novella has had differing interpretations, often mutually exclusive. Many critics have tried to determine the exact nature of the evil hinted at by the story. However, others have...
After Dark is a collection of six short stories by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1856. It was the author's first collection of short stories. Five of the stories were previously published in Household Words, a magazine edited by Charles Dickens.
The stories are linked by a narrative framework.
At the beginning and end of the book are "Leaves from Leah's Diary": William Kerby, a travelling...
A wonderful short story, which perfectly sets forth Francis Hodgson Burnett's philosophy of life in the form of an engaging narrative of a depressed and suicidal businessman who loses his way in a London fog and meets a number of strangers who change his outlook on life.
The Willows is a novella by English author Algernon Blackwood, originally published as part of his 1907 collection The Listener and Other Stories. It is one of Blackwood's best known works and has been influential on a number of later writers. Horror author H.P. Lovecraft considered it to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature. The Willows is an example of early modern horror and...
Old Mortality is a novel by Sir Walter Scott set in the period 1679–89 in south west Scotland. It forms, along with The Black Dwarf, the 1st series of Scott's Tales of My Landlord. The two novels were published together in 1816. Old Mortality is considered one of Scott's best novels.
It was originally titled The Tale of Old Mortality, but is generally shortened in most references.
After...
Containing much valuable information concerning soups and soup-making, and fifty recipes for soups of all kinds, simple and elaborate. "One of the most charming little cook-books recently published."- Christian Union.
The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring (originally published London, 1898) is a philosophical commentary on Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, by the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw.
Shaw offered it to those enthusiastic admirers of Wagner who "were unable to follow his ideas, and do not in the least understand the dilemma of Wotan."...
The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans is one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is one of eight stories in the cycle collected as His Last Bow, and is the second and final appearance of Mycroft Holmes. Doyle ranked The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans fourteenth in a list of his nineteen favourite Sherlock Holmes stories.
The...
Twelfth Night; or, What You Will is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written around 1601–02 as a Twelfth Night's entertainment for the close of the Christmas season. The play centres on the twins Viola andSebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck. Viola (who is disguised as a boy) falls in love with Duke Orsino, who in turn is in love...
Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, published in 20 monthly installments between March 1852 and September 1853. It is held to be one of Dickens's finest novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots in his entire canon. The story is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by a mostly omniscient narrator....
Puck of Pook's Hill is a fantasy book by Rudyard Kipling, published in 1906, containing a series of short stories set in different periods of English history. It can count both as historical fantasy – since some of the stories told of the past have clear magical elements, and as contemporary fantasy – since it depicts a magical being active and practising his magic in the England of...
Henry VIII is a history play generally believed to be a collaboration between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, based on the life of Henry VIII of England. An alternative title, All is True, is recorded in contemporary documents, the title Henry VIII not appearing until the play's publication in the First Folio of 1623. Stylistic...
The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet: A Sermon in Crude Melodrama is a one-act play by George Bernard Shaw, first produced in in 1909. Shaw describes the play as a religious tract in dramatic form.
In 1909 Shaw jousted with governmental censorship, as personified by The Examiner Of Plays, an agency acting under the auspices of the Lord Chamberlain. The outcome, unsatisfactory to Shaw, is reviewed...
A Legend of Montrose is an historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, set in Scotland in the 1640s during the Civil War. It forms, along with The Bride of Lammermoor, the 3rd series of Scott's Tales of My Landlord. The two novels were published together in 1819.
Earl of Montrose
The story takes place during the Earl of Montrose's 1644-5 Highland campaign on behalf of King Charles I against the...
Modern Essays is thirty-three epitomal English and American personal essays chosen by Christopher Morley - a novelist who conceived the reader of his anthology as “a friend spending the evening in happy gossip along the shelves.”
I purpose telling you in the following pages about the exploits of the gallant men who composed the American Navy, beginning with the Revolution and ending with the story of their wonderful deeds in our late war with Spain. You can never read a more interesting story, nor one that will make you feel prouder of your birthright. While our patriot armies have done nobly, it is none the less true...
La Peau de chagrin (French pronunciation: [la po dəʃaɡʁɛ̃], The Magic Skin or The Wild Ass's Skin) is an 1831 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850). Set in early 19th-century Paris, it tells the story of a young man who finds a magic piece of shagreen that fulfills his...
'On the first day of February we three will sail from Boston for Messina, in the little fruit-ship "Wasp." We shall probably be a month going, unless we cross in a gale as I did, splitting sails every night, and standing on our heads most of the way,' said Amanda, folding up her maps with an air of calm decision.
'Hurrah! what fun!' cried Matilda, waving a half-finished dressing-case over her...