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A critical essay on Blake's style and themes prefaces a collection of his works

These two classic novels, together with Charlotte Bronte's well-known Jane Eyre and Villette, comprise a magnificent oeuvre, each one a singular achievement of characterization, human understanding, and narrative elegance and drama.Shirley is the story of a complicated friendship between two very different women: shy and socially constrained Caroline, the poor niece of a tyrannical clergyman; and the independent heiress Shirley, who has both the resources and the spirit to defy convention. The romantic entanglements of the two women with a local mill owner and his penniless brother pit the claims of passion against the boundaries of class and society.The Professor - the first novel Bronte completed, the last to be published - is both a disturbing love story and the coming-of-age tale of a self-made man. At its center is William Crimsworth, who has come to Brussels to work as an instructor in a school for girls. When he becomes entangled with Zoraide Reuter, a charismatic and brilliantl

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Evelyn Waugh's short stories are the marvelous, concentrated riffs of his comic genius, revealing in miniaturized perfection all the elements that made him the greatest c

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the

Written in the lucid intervals between the bouts of dementia that haunted his final years, Praeterita tells the story of John Ruskin's early life - the formation of his taste and intellect through ed

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)In his first and still most widely read novel, James Joyce makes a strange peace with the traditional narrative of a young man’s self-discovery by respecting its substanc

Black Mischief is Waugh at his most mischievous - inventing a politically loopy African state as a means of pulverizing politics at home. In Scoop, it is journalism's turn to be drawn and quartered. T

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Balzac considered it the most important French novel of his time. Andre Gide later deemed it the greatest of all French novels, and Henry James judged it to be a masterpi