Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

The greatest English comic novelist of the twentieth century produced a considerable body of shorter fiction, including several master-pieces, notably Mr Loveday's Little Outing and Scott-King's Modern Europe. These stories have all Waugh's characteristically brilliant, savage wit and reproduce his unmistakeable world in miniature. They also constitute a vital supplement to the major novels, while standing up as significant works in their own right. Two chapters of Waugh's tantalizingly unfinished novel Work Suspended are also included. This edition brings back into print 17 stories that have long been unavailable in England and America.

The Complete Short Stories

Anne Brontë

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Anne Bronte's second and most celebrated novel. Set in the dramatic northern landscape made familiar by the author's more famous sisters, it tells the story of Helen Graham, a mysterious single woman who rents the semi-ruinous Hall of the title. With a child but no husband, Helen divides the community between those who admire her charm and spirit and those who suspect her morals. Chief among her supporters is a local farmer, Gilbert Markham, who tells her story. 
 
Written before The Tenant, Agnes Grey, based on the author's own experience, explores the position of women in Victorian society through the story of a young woman forced to work as a governess when her father is ruined financially.

Agnes Grey/The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) made one reputation during his lifetime with his Utopian satire Erewhon, and a second reputation after his death with The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously. This novel, the story of Ernest Pontifex, is a thinly disguised autobiography in which Butler brutally but hilariously savages the financial, sexual, familial and spiritual hypocrisies of late Victorian England.

The Way Of All Flesh

Thomas Hardy

When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D&rsquo;Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her &lsquo;cousin&rsquo; Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future

Tess Of The D'urbervilles

Emily Brontë

The title of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors of the story. The narrative centres on the all-encompassing, passionate, but ultimately doomed love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and the people around them

Wuthering Heights

Marcel Proust

In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann’s Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann’s daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attention—Albertine, “a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks.” 
 
For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).

In Search Of Lost Time Volume 2

Edith Wharton

Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by 'old money' and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing, and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something&mdash;fastidiousness or integrity&mdash;prevents her from making a 'suitable' match.

The House Of Mirth

Henry James

When a beautiful, spoilt, aristocratic woman with revolutionary ambitions meets an idealistic young proletarian conspirator who dreams of a better life, the stage is set for The Princess Casamassima in which Henry James explores the London underworld and the political unrest seething there in the later nineteenth century. In the end, Christina Light’s waywardness proves fatal for the fancifully named Hyacinth Robinson, but not before the typically Jamesian encounter of instinct and intelligence has been explored in all its tragi-comic potential.

The Princess Casamassima

Isabel Archer is a young, intelligent, and spirited American girl, determined to relish her first experience of Europe. She rejects two eligible suitors in her fervent commitment to liberty and independence, declaring that she will never marry. Thanks to the generosity of her devoted cousin Ralph, she is free to make her own choice about her destiny. Yet in the intoxicating worlds of Paris, Florence, and Rome, her fond illusions of self-reliance are twisted by the machinations of her friends and apparent allies. What had seemed to be a vista of infinite promise steadily closes around her and becomes instead a 'house of suffocation'.

The Portrait Of A Lady

Edith Wharton's novel reworks the eternal triangle of two women and a man in a strikingly original manner. When about to marry the beautiful and conventional May Welland, Newland Archer falls in love with her very unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska. The consequent drama, set in New York during the 1870s, reveals terrifying chasms under the polished surface of upper-class society as the increasingly fraught Archer struggles with conflicting obligations and desires. The first woman to do so, Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for this dark comedy of manners which was immediately recognized as one of her greatest achievements.

The Age Of Innocence

Ivan Turgenev

"So ... you were convinced of all this and decided not to do anything serious yourselves." 
"And decided not to do anything serious," Bazarov repeated grimly. ... 
"But to confine yourselves to abuse?" 
"To confine ourselves to abuse." 
"And that is called nihilism?" 
"And that is called nihilism," Bazarov repeated again, this time with marked insolence. 
 
The book examines the conflict of attitudes in mid-19th-century Russia, as distant pre-echoes of the Revolution continue to rumble through the remote rural landscape. The story follows the Kirsanov family, representatives of the old regime, and the violent character of the anti-hero Bazarov. 
 
Introduced by Michael R Katz who was born in New York City and educated at Horace Mann School, Williams College, and Oxford University. He is the author of two books and over fifteen translations of Russian novels into English, including works by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy.

Fathers And Children

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The illegitimate son of a landowner and his common-law peasant wife, Arkady Dolgoruky has scarcely seen these parents during his nineteen years of life. In a narrative combining farce and pathos, Dostoevsky describes Arkady's visit to St Petersburg in search of the 'accidental family' who have dominated his dreams. The confrontation with them does not turn out quite as he imagined it. This relatively late novel, written in the last decade of the author's life, nevertheless captures the exuberance and embarrassments, the bliss and bale of adolescence in all its volatility and uncertainty.

The Adolescent

THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY is probably Edith Wharton's most savage satire on the manners of late nineteenth-century America. It is the story of the exquisitely beautiful but brutally ambitious Undine Spragg who marries her way into the high aristocracy of Europe, abandoning several husbands along the way. This novel, which has scences of comedy and even farce, is a commentary on both certain aspects of feminisim and certain aspects of capitalism in Edith Wharton's time. The novel makes a fitting companion to THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and THE HOUSE OF MIRTH and shows Wharton to be one of the greatest American novelists.

The Custom Of The Country

In The Guermantes Way Proust's narrator recalls his initiation into the dazzling world of Parisian high society. Looking back over his time in the glamorous salons of the aristocracy, he satirises this shallow world and his own youthful infatuation with it. His observations, and his experiences with his lover Albertine, also educate him in the volatile nature of desire as he walks the path towards adulthood.

In Search Of Lost Time Volume 3

Jane Austen

Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results.The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her.

Mansfield Park

Charles Dickens

Amy Dorrit's father is not very good with money. She was born in the Marshalsea debtors' prison and has lived there with her family for all of her twenty-two years, only leaving during the day to work as a seamstress for the forbidding Mrs. Clennam. But Amy's fortunes are about to change: the arrival of Mrs. Clennam's son Arthur, back from working in China, heralds the beginning of stunning revelations not just about Amy but also about Arthur himself.

Little Dorrit

One of Dicken's great middle period novels, in which fairy tale, melodrama and realism mingle with halluncinatory power, DOMBEY AND SON weaves together a number of stories which centre upon the family of the self-important merchant, Paul Dombey, and his children Paul and Florence. Supplied with the usual extraordinary cast of Dickensian grotesques, both comic and sinister, the novel also boasts a wonderful villain, in the person of Mr Carker, who tries to seduce Florence and meets his death under a train - the first such death in literary history.

Dombey And Son

Anthony Trollope

Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium and former Prime Minister of England, is widowed and wracked by grief. Struggling to adapt to life without his beloved Lady Glencora, he works hard to guide and support his three adult children. Palliser soon discovers, however, that his own plans for them are very different from their desires. Sent down from university in disgrace, his two sons quickly begin to run up gambling debts. His only daughter, meanwhile, longs passionately to marry the poor son of a county squire against her father's will. But while the Duke's dearest wishes for the three are thwarted one by one, he ultimately comes to understand that parents can learn from their own children.

The Duke's Children

Hardy described the theme of THE WOODLANDERS as 'the immortal puzzle -given the man and woman, how to find a basis for their sexual relation'. Set in the familiar Dorset landscape, this time on the wooded outskirts of Blackmoor Vale, it tells the story of two women who love the same man. The elegant Grace Melbury and homelier Marty South compete for the attention of Giles Winterbourne, but both are doomed to disappointment. Written in 1887, shortly before TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES, THE WOODLANDERS has none of that novel's fierce cruelty. Though often sad, it is also lyrical and gentle, drawing the complexities of female desires with a notably subtle hand. This is one of Hardy's most accomplished mature novels, with a fine finish he did not always achieve, and it was among his own favourites. The Everyman edition is published to coincide with the launch of the Channel 4 Film starring Rufus Sewell, Polly Walker, Tony Haygarth and Emily Woolfe, directed by Phil Agland.

The Woodlanders

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter with a man to whom she is not married and then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. As punishment, she must wear a scarlet letter 'A' (for &quot;adultery&quot;). Containing a number of religious and historic allusions, the book explores themes of legalism, sin and guilt.

The Scarlet Letter

The concluding episode in Trollope's magnificent sequence of six Barsetshire novels narrates the trials of Joseph Crawley, the obsessive rector of Hogglestovk, as he struggles to clear his name from accusations of theft. But Crawley's story is only one thread in a complex tapesty which includes favourite characters from earlier novels in this delicately planned finale to the sequence. Four of the Barset novels - THE WARDEN, BARCHESTER TOWERS, DOCTOR THORNE AND FRAMLEY PARSONAGE already appear in Everyman. THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON will be published in 1996

The Last Chronicle Of Barset

Although described by Jane Austen as a character 'whom no one but myself will much like', the irrepressible Emma Woodhouse is one of her most beloved heroines. Clever, rich and beautiful, she sees no need for marriage, but loves interfering in the romantic lives of others, until her matchmaking plans unravel, with consequences that she never expected. Jane Austen's novel of youthful exuberance and gradual self-knowledge is a brilliant, sparkling comic masterpiece.

Emma

Joseph Conrad

In a novella which remains highly controversial to this day, Conrad explores the relations between Africa and Europe. On the surface, this is a horrifying tale of colonial exploitation. The narrator, Marlowe journeys on business deep into the heart of Africa. But there he encounters Kurtz, an idealist apparently crazed and depraved by his power over the natives, and the meeting prompts Marlowe to reflect on the darkness at the heart of all men. This short but complex and often ambiguous story, which has been the basis of several films and plays, continues to provoke interpretation and discussion.

Heart Of Darkness

When Catherine Sloper falls for Maurice Townsend, her father, a wealthy New York doctor, believes that Townsend is a fortune hunter after his daughter’s inheritance. He forbids the marriage but Catherine persists in her affection, encouraged by her foolish aunt Lavinia who has a weakness for Maurice herself. Dr Sloper takes Catherine abroad to distract her from the infatuation, but she proves to be as stubborn as her father. The book is a vivid study of the four central characters drawn in what are, for this author, unusually strong primary colours. 
Six novels by Henry James and two volumes of his shorter fiction are already published in Everyman’s Library.

Washington Square

Charlotte Brontë

The narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a French boarding school in the town of Villette. There she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginerva Fanshawe, a beautiful coquette

Villette

Honoré de Balzac

Set in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, it relates the story of the vengeful Bette who, along with her scheming accomplice Valérie Marneffe, sets out to ruin her extended family. Exploring themes of lust, greed and virtue, Balzac delivers a powerful, absorbing literary classic, and an unmissable read

Cousin Bette

In this extraordinary variation on the theme of the eternal triangle, Henry James contrasts two women who love one man: the magnificent but ambitious and unscrupulous Kate Croy, and the fragile heiress Millie Theale whose early death precipitates the story's surprising outcome. Together with THE GOLDEN BOWL and THE AMBASSADORS, this novel completes a celebrated trilogy in which James explores his perennial themes of love and renunciation with all the strength, drama and subtlety of a very great writer at the height of his powers.

The Wings Of The Dove

Jane Austen seems to have been born with the comic precision and other-worldly insight she everywhere displays in Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel (1811), which, though revised later, was completed in 1797 at the age of twenty-two. This meticulously constructed story of two sisters with opposing temperaments and romantic inclinations exemplifies the distilled spirit of classicism in English literature.

Sense And Sensibility

The distinctive combination of manic comedy, bitter satire and fierce melodrama separates this novel from its author's other works. Published in 1844 after Dickens returned from America, the action moves between Britain and United States in ways which highligh the failing of both societies. The Everyman edition is being published to tie in with a major BBC TV serialization in the autumn.

Martin Chuzzlewit

Henry Fielding

Tom Jones is one of the earliest English novels, and was hugely popular when it was first published in 1749. It tells the story of the foundling Tom and his journey towards adulthood and marriage. As might be expected, this journey is a complicated one: Tom falls in love with a neighbour's daughter, discovers that he has a rival for his love in the shape of the unpleasant Master Blifil, and is expelled from Mr Allworthy's house after a series of misadventures.

Tom Jones

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