The Everymans Library 100 Essentials brings together a selection of 100 of the bestselling titles from the most extensive and distinguished collectible library of the worlds greatest works. An enduring hardcover library of classic and contemporary works from literature to history to philosophy, Everymans Library editions feature original introductions, up-to-date bibliographies, and complete chronologies of the authors lives and works.
This set includes one each of the following titles:
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Analects by Confucius
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Arabian Nights by Husain Haddawy
The Audubon Reader by John James Audubon
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler
Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh
The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Carried Away by Alice Munro
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler
Collected Stories by Roald Dahl
Collected Stories by Franz Kafka
Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham
The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike
The Complete Short Novels by Anton Chekhov
The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Dubliners by James Joyce
Essays by George Orwell
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani
The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Histories by Herodotus
A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipul
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Human Factor by Graham Greene
The Iliad by Homer
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann
The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
Mr. Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
My Ántonia by Willa Cather
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
The Odyssey by Homer
Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Drivers Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
The Republic by Plato
Rights of Man and Common Sense by Thomas Paine
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan
Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripleys Game by Patricia Highsmith
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
The Woman Warrior and China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Ulysses by James Joyce
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion
Zenos Conscience by Italo Svevo
Everymans Library continues to maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking. Everymans Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.
An orphan who endures a harsh childhood, Jane Eyre becomes governess at Thornfield Hall in the employment of the mysterious Mr. Rochester. Jane's moral pilgrimage and the maturity of Charlotte Bronte's characterization are celebrated aspects of the novel, as is its imagery and narrative power. Rapidly reprinted following its first publication in 1847, Jane Eyre still enjoys huge popularity as one of the finest novels in the English language.
Charlotte Brontës novel about the passionate love between Jane Eyre, a young girl alone in the world, and the rich, brilliant, domineering Rochester has, ever since its publication in 1847, enthralled every kind of reader, from the most critical and cultivated to the youngest and most unabashedly romantic. It lives as one of the great triumphs of storytelling and as a moving affirmation of the prerogatives of the heart in the face of disappointment and misfortune.
Includes bibliographical references (p. xxx-xxxi).
Charlotte Bronte was born at Thornton, Yorkshire, on April 21, 1816. Her father, Patrick Bronte, became curate for life of the moorland parish of Haworth, Yorkshire, in 1820, and her mother, Maria Bronte, died the following year, leaving behind five daughters and a son who were cared for in the parsonage by their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. The eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, died in 1825 from tuberculosis contracted at the religious boarding school to which they (along with Charlotte and her younger sister Emily) had been sent. (All the Bronte children ultimately suffered from lung disease.)
Raised at home thereafter, Charlotte, Emily, their youngest sister, Anne, and brother, Branwell, lived in a fantasy world of their own making, drawing on their voracious reading of Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, The Arabian Nights, and gothic fiction, and writing elaborate poetic and dramatic cycles involving the histories of imaginary countries. Charlotte's early writings revolved around the kingdom of Angria, about which she wrote melodramatic tales of passion and revenge. She spent a year studying at Miss Wooler's school in Roe Head (later relocated to Dewsbury Moor), and went back there to teach from 1835 to 1838; subsequently she worked as a governess.
With Emily, Charlotte traveled in 1842 to study languages at a boarding school in Brussels; her close emotional attachment to her instructor, M. Heger, a married man, would later figure in her fiction. Charlotte and Emily went home after a year because of their aunt's death; Charlotte subsequently returned to Brussels for a year of teaching, 1843 to 1844. A joint collection of poems by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—published pseudonymously as Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell—appeared in 1846. The three sisters had in the meantime each written a novel, of which Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were accepted in 1847 for publication the following year. Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, based on her experiences in Brussels, was rejected by a series of publishers (it finally appeared posthumously in 1857).
Jane Eyre was published under Charlotte's pseudonym, Currer Bell, in 1847 and achieved commercial and critical success; it had gone through four editions by the time of Charlotte's death. Jane Eyre won high praises; William Makepeace Thackeray (who later became a friend) declared himself 'exceedingly moved and pleased,' and George Henry Lewes applauded its 'deep significant reality'; it was also criticized by some for the rebelliousness of its heroine and for what the Quarterly Review called 'coarseness of language and laxity of tone.'
During this period the Brontes underwent repeated tragedies. Branwell, despite his early promise, had been ravaged by the effects of drink and drugs, and when he found work as a tutor in the same household where Anne was a governess, his involvement with his employer's wife led to his dismissal; he died in September of 1848, followed three months later by Emily and the following year by Anne. Charlotte, the sole survivor, published two more novels, Shirley (1849), a novel of Yorkshire during the Napoleonic period, and Villette (1853), a further fictional exploration of her Brussels experiences. In 1850 she met the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, with whom she formed a close friendship; Gaskell later wrote the classic biography of her friend, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857). Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, in 1854, and died on March 31, 1855.
From the Trade Paperback edition.