FREE English Ebook

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skilful manipulation. He conjures...

The Years Between, a collection of poems written during the period from just after the Boer War till the aftermath of World War I, was originally published in 1919. It was the first volume of new poems by Kipling published since "The Five Nations" in 1903; including the first book appearance of Kipling's celebrated "The Female of the Species," with its awed refrain "The female of the species is...

Women in Love is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence published in 1920. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow(1915), and follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an industrialist. Lawrence contrasts this pair with the love that develops...

Jane Eyre (originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography) is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published on 16 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London, England, under the pen name "Currer Bell." The first American edition was published the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York. Primarily of the bildungsroman genre, Jane Eyre follows the emotions...

The Making Of A Saint, published in 1898, was W. Somerset Maugham's second novel. He always regarded it as his black sheep, even tried to suppress its republication. His disaffection is not easy to understand. The book enjoyed a good reception and continues to be well reviewed. It remains today, as it was on publication, an intense and highly colored novel of plot and counterplot, passion and...

Quentin Durward is a historical novel by Walter Scott, first published in 1823. The story concerns a Scottish archer in the service of the French King Louis XI (1423–1483). The age of feudalism and chivalry was passing away, and the King of France was inciting the wealthy citizens of Flanders against his own rebellious vassal the Duke of Burgundy. Quentin Durward had come to Tours, where...

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the second and final novel by English author Anne Brontë, published in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell. Probably the most shocking of the Brontës' novels, this novel had an instant phenomenal success but after Anne's death, her sister Charlotte prevented its re-publication. The novel is framed as a letter from Gilbert Markham to his friend and...

The Merry Wives of Windsor is a comedy by William Shakespeare, first published in 1602, though believed to have been written prior to 1597. The Windsor of the play's title is a reference to Windsor Castle in Berkshire, England, and though nominally set in the reign of Henry IV, the play makes no pretence to exist outside contemporary Elizabethan era English...

Letters of Travel (1892-1913), originally published in 1920, is a collection of articles on Japan, the United States, Canada and Egypt.

Overruled (1912) is a comic one-act play written during by George Bernard Shaw. In Shaw's words, it is about "how polygamy occurs among quite ordinary people innocent of all unconventional views concerning it." The play concerns two couples who desire to switch partners, but are prevented from doing so by various considerations and end up negotiating an ambiguous set of...

Villette is an 1853 novel by Charlotte Brontë. After an unspecified family disaster, the protagonist Lucy Snowe travels from England to the fictional French-speaking city of Villette to teach at a girls' school, where she is drawn into adventure and romance. Villette was Charlotte Brontë's fourth novel. It was preceded by the posthumously published The Professor, her first, and then by...

Measure for Measure is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1603 or 1604. Originally published in the First Folio of 1623, where it was listed as a comedy, the play's first recorded performance occurred in 1604. The play's main themes include justice, "mortality and mercy in Vienna," and the dichotomy between corruption and purity: "some rise by sin,...

Woodstock, or The Cavalier. A Tale of the Year Sixteen Hundred and Fifty-one (1826) is a historical novel by Walter Scott. Set just after the English Civil War, it was inspired by the legend of the Good Devil of Woodstock, which in 1649 supposedly tormented parliamentary commissioners who had taken possession of a royal residence at Woodstock, Oxfordshire. The story deals with the escape of...

Guy Mannering or The Astrologer is a novel by Sir Walter Scott, published anonymously in 1815. According to an introduction that Scott wrote in 1829, he had originally intended to write a story of the supernatural, but changed his mind soon after starting. The book was a huge success, the first edition selling out on the first day of publication. Guy Mannering, after leaving Oxford, is...

The Phantom 'Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales (published 1888) is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. The Phantom 'Rickshaw After an affair with a Mrs. Agnes Keith-Wessington in Simla, the narrator, Jack, repudiates her and eventually becomes engaged to Miss Kitty Mannering. Yet Mrs. Wessington continually reappears in Jack's life, begging him to reconsider, insisting that it was...

Rob Roy (1817) is a historical novel by Walter Scott. It is narrated by Frank Osbaldistone, the son of an English merchant who travels first to the North of England, and subsequently to the Scottish Highlands, to collect a debt stolen from his father. On the way he encounters the larger-than-life title character, Rob Roy MacGregor. Though Rob Roy is not the lead character (in fact, the narrative...

Much Ado About Nothing is a comedic play by William Shakespeare thought to have been written in 1598 and 1599, as Shakespeare was approaching the middle of his career. The play was included in the First Folio, published in 1623. Much Ado About Nothing is generally considered one of Shakespeare's best comedies, because it combines elements of robust hilarity with more...

Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft is a series of essays by Sir Walter Scott on the subject of the witch-craze, demonology, and other occult topics. It is an early review of the literature that others such as Murray would be analyzing in the next century. Scott has an antiquarian mind, and obviously relishes exposing the reader to the grotesque and the unusual.

The Heart of Midlothian is the seventh of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels. It was originally published in four volumes on 25 July 1818, under the title of Tales of My Landlord, 2nd series, and the author was given as "Jedediah Cleishbotham, Schoolmaster and Parish-clerk of Gandercleugh". Although the identity of the author of the Waverley Novels was well known by this time, Scott still...

Poor Folk (Russian: Бедные люди, Bednye Lyudi), sometimes translated as Poor People, is the first novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, written over the span of nine months between 1844 and 1845. Dostoyevsky was in financial difficulty because of his extravagant living and his developing gambling addiction; although he had produced some translations of...