During his tragically short life, Stephen Crane gained fame as a vividly distinctive writer. This collection of stories is replete with lively dialogue, ominous atmospheres, dry humour and graphic incidents.

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 heroine, Fanny Price, has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her feelings while enduring the amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her.

Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel depicts the great clashes between capital and labour, which arose from rapid industrialisation and problems of trade in the mid-19th century. Mary Barton was published in 1848, at a time of great social ferment in Europe, and it reflects its revolutionary moment through an English lens.

Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party. Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers gradually reveal the characters of the central protagonists. Clarissa's life is touched by tragedy as the events in her day run parallel to those of Septimus Warren Smith.

Night Shivers presents a treasure trove of the stories of Mrs J. H. Riddell, one of the greatest Victorian writers of ghost stories.

E. F. Benson was a master of the ghost story and now all his rich, imaginative, spine-tingling and beautifully written tales are presented together in this bumper collection.

The Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, Big Brother - '1984' itself: these terms have moved from the world of fiction into our everyday lives. They are central to our thinking about freedom and its suppression; yet they were created by George Orwell in 1949 as he conjured his dystopian vision of a world where totalitarian power is absolute.

Follows the story of the heroine's movement from the tranquil but moribund ways of southern England to the north. This book uses a love story to show how personal and public lives were woven together in a industrial society. It traces the origins of problems and possibilities which are still challenging a hundred and fifty years later.