Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson and Browning. He was still writing with unimpaired power sixty years later, when Eliot and Yeats were the leading names in the field. His extraordinary stamina and a consistent individuality of style and vision made him a survivor, immune to literary fashion. At the start of the twenty-first century his reputation stands higher than it ever did, even in his own lifetime. He is now recognised not only as a great poet, but as one who is widely loved. He speaks with directness, humanity and humour to scholarly or ordinary readers alike.

    Middlemarch, Eliot’s most famous work, paints a rich and complex portrait of English society. In Silas Marner, an embittered man retreats from the outside world, thinking only of work and money. Then his wealth is stolen, and a young foundling comes into his life and changes everything. Also included: the short story “Amos Barton.”

    The story will continue in the next generation in Annie's Girl.

    This volume brings together for the first time three classic novels from his most productive period. The Woman in White (1860) is a tale of mystery and mistaken identity told by its various characters in turn. From the moment when a lovely young woman surprises Walter Hartwright in moonlit north London, Collins keeps the reader in suspense until the entire mesh of secrets is unwoven. In The Moonstone (1868) a fabulous yellow diamond disappears from the Verinders' country house in Yorkshire. Witnesses, suspects, and detectives all take up the story, and their narratives lead towards a melodramatic, unforeseeable conclusion. Valeria Woodville in The Law and the Lady (1875) must unravel the secrets of her husband's earlier life; she takes the law into her own hands and becomes one of the first woman detectives in fiction.

    A treasure trove of astonishing historical detail.

    Out of place among the splendors of Nevon, Josina nevertheless falls in love with the handsome Duke. And though he's bound by duty to marry his lovely young cousin, Josina doesn't feel worthy and flees in despair. But neither of them can escape love.

    When she takes revenge on her tormentor, fate conspires against her once more." Under the Greenwood Tree: "Dick, an honest village hauler, worships the flighty, ambitious Fancy Day. Will she marry him - or are her sights set higher? Poignant, comic and astute, this is one of Hardy's happiest and best-known works."The Well-Beloved: "Pierston spends his life searching for the "well-beloved" or ideal mate. From youth to old age, even courting three generations of women from the same family, until he gets his final, ironic comeuppance."

    But after a successful London Season, a shock awaited Zarina--her Guardian demanded that she wed a Duke. But this was no Fairy Tale match, for the Duke was a widower more than twice Zarina's age...The determined heiress proposed a scheme to, her childhood playmate, now the destitute Earl of Linwood. On a steamer to India, their ruse became real, when a suspicious Ship's Captain insisted upon marrying the young couple. And before long a shy love blossomed into a Fairy-Tale indeed--a lifetime of Divine happiness for all the days of their lives...

    Notably successful as a young man in Birmingham's metal-manufacturing industry, he tackled politics as business—venture by venture, innovative in organization as well as product, alert to the importance of accounting and marketing. Aggressive and direct in both personality and principle, he was loyal to enterprise rather than to party. He never became prime minister, yet by the beginning of the twentieth century he was by general consent "the first minister of the British Empire."This book by Peter T. Marsh is the first complete, archivally based, single-volume biography of Chamberlain. Skillfully dissecting his political career, Marsh reveals Chamberlain's radically fresh approach to most of Britain's problems between the Second Reform Act and the First World War. He also highlights the distortions and discontinuities: the breach with Gladstone over Irish Home Rule, which drove Chamberlain from the left of the Liberal party into enduring alliance with the Conservative right; how Chamberlain came to be the champion of the House of Lords instead of its scourge; the cause and effects of Chamberlain's shift from free trader to protectionist. In addition, Marsh explains Chamberlain's internationalism, his involvement in South Africa, Canada, and the United States, and his sustained campaign to develop the Empire's "undeveloped estates."Searching and judicious, the book evokes the contradictions in Chamberlain's personality and private life, his vigor, intensity, and imperious self-confidence along with his inner desolation and lifelong nervous strain. Finely written and argued, the book makes compelling reading, presenting the story of a life that is one of the most absorbing in modern British politics.

    This book provides a history of chatelaines with special attention paid to the 19th century, when the Victorians used them them for keys, sewing, dance, perfume bottles, spectacles and purses. Illustrations show the quality and variety of the examples produced. In addition, the book contains historical and sociological information about the people who wore and used chatelaines as well as much new material and information, collected together for the first time.