http://www.feedbooks.com/list/21 The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction was selected by Charles W. Eliot, LLD (1834-1926), with notes and introductions by William Allan Neilson. It also features an index to Criticisms and Interpretations. Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen http://www.feedbooks.com/book/52 urn:isbn:0553213105 en 1813 Novels Romance Pride And Prejudice, the story of Mrs. Bennet's attempts to marry off her five daughters is one of the best-loved and most enduring classics in English literature. Excitement fizzes through the Bennet household at Longbourn in Hertfordshire when young, eligible Mr. Charles Bingley rents the fine house nearby. He may have sisters, but he also has male friends, and one of these—the haughty, and even wealthier, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy—irks the vivacious Elizabeth Bennet, the second of the Bennet girls. She annoys him. Which is how we know they must one day marry. The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and Darcy is a splendid rendition of civilized sparring. As the characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, Jane Austen's radiantly caustic wit and keen observation sparkle. http://www.feedbooks.com/book/52.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/52.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/52.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/52.mobi A Sentimental Journey Laurence Sterne http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1764 urn:isbn:0199537186 en 1768 Novels A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is a novel by the Irish-born English author Laurence Sterne, written and first published in 1768, as Sterne was facing death. In 1765 Laurence Sterne travelled through France and Italy as far south as Naples, and after returning determined to describe his travels from a sentimental point of view. The novel can be seen as an epilogue to the possibly unfinished work The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and also as an answer to Tobias Smollett's decidedly unsentimental Travels through France and Italy. (Sterne met Smollett during his travels in Europe, and strongly objected to his spleen, acerbity and quarrelsomeness. He modeled the character of Smelfungus on him.) The novel was extremely popular and influential and helped establish travel writing as the dominant genre of the second half of the 18th century. Unlike prior travel accounts which stressed classical learning and objective non-personal points of view, A Sentimental Journey emphasized the subjective discussions of personal taste and sentiments, of manners and morals over classical learning. Throughout the 1770s women travel writers began publishing significant numbers of sentimental travel accounts. Sentiment also became a favorite style among those expressing non-mainstream views including political radicalism. The narrator is the Reverend Mr. Yorick, who is slyly represented to guileless readers as Sterne's barely disguised alter ego. The book recounts his various adventures, usually of the amorous type, in a series of self-contained episodes. The book is less eccentric and more elegant in style than Tristram Shandy and was better received by contemporary critics. It was published on February 27, and on March 18 Sterne died. http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1764.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1764.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1764.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1764.mobi Rappaccini's Daughter Nathaniel Hawthorne http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1676 urn:isbn:1843910357 en 1844 Short Fiction http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1676.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1676.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1676.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1676.mobi The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling Henry Fielding http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1671 en 1749 Novels Humor/Satire Tom Jones is a foundling discovered on the property of a very kind, wealthy landowner, Squire Allworthy, in Somerset in England's West Country. Tom grows into a vigorous and lusty, yet honest and kind-hearted, youth. He develops affection for his neighbour's daughter, Sophia Western. On one hand, their love reflects the romantic comedy genre that was popular in 18th-century Britain. However, Tom's status as a bastard causes Sophia's father and Allworthy to oppose their love; this criticism of class friction in society acted as a biting social commentary. The inclusion of prostitution and sexual promiscuity in the plot was also original for its time, and also acted as the foundation for criticism of the book's "lowness." http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1671.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1671.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1671.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1671.mobi Ivan the Fool Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1669 en 1882 Short Fiction Young Readers This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70 and in the USA. http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1669.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1669.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1669.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1669.mobi Crime and Punishment Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky http://www.feedbooks.com/book/38 urn:isbn:0679420290 en 1866 Novels Psychology The poverty-stricken Raskolnikov, believing he is exempt from moral law, murders a man only to face the consequences not only from society but from his conscience, in this seminal story of justice, morality, and redemption from one of Russia's greatest novelists. http://www.feedbooks.com/book/38.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/38.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/38.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/38.mobi Anna Karenina Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1487 urn:isbn:1593080271 en 1877 Novels Romance Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness. This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70 and in the USA. http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1487.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1487.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1487.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1487.mobi The Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Wolfgang von Goethe http://www.feedbooks.com/book/348 urn:isbn:0812969901 en 1774 Novels The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) is an epistolary and loosely autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774; a revised edition of the novel was published in 1787. Werther was an important novel of the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and it also influenced the later Romantic literary movement. http://www.feedbooks.com/book/348.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/348.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/348.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/348.mobi Father Goriot Honoré de Balzac http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1631 urn:isbn:039397166X en 1834 Novels http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1631.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1631.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1631.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1631.mobi The Portrait of a Lady Henry James http://www.feedbooks.com/book/413 urn:isbn:0375759190 en 1881 Novels Romance One of the great heroines of American literature, Isabel Archer, journeys to Europe in order to, as Henry James writes in his 1908 Preface, “affront her destiny.” James began The Portrait of a Lady without a plot or subject, only the slim but provocative notion of a young woman taking control of her fate. The result is a richly imagined study of an American heiress who turns away her suitors in an effort to first establish—and then protect—her independence. But Isabel’s pursuit of spiritual freedom collapses when she meets the captivating Gilbert Osmond. “James’s formidable powers of observation, his stance as a kind of bachelor recorder of human doings in which he is not involved,” writes Hortense Calisher, “make him a first-class documentarian, joining him to that great body of storytellers who amass what formal history cannot.” This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70 and in the USA. http://www.feedbooks.com/book/413.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/413.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/413.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/413.mobi The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Washington Irving http://www.feedbooks.com/book/196 urn:isbn:0809594080 en 1820 Short Fiction Horror Ghost Stories http://www.feedbooks.com/book/196.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/196.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/196.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/196.mobi The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1523 en 1850 Novels Romance Gothic The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, is an American novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and is generally considered to be his magnum opus. Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who gives birth after committing adultery, refuses to name the father, and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the novel, Hawthorne explores questions of grace, legalism, sin and guilt. http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1523.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1523.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1523.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1523.mobi David Copperfield Charles Dickens http://www.feedbooks.com/book/673 urn:isbn:0679783415 en 1850 Novels David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Charles Dickens's own life. Its eponymous hero, orphaned as a boy, grows up to discover love and happiness, heartbreak and sorrow amid a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains. Praising Dickens's power of invention, Somerset Maugham wrote: "There were never such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens's exultant imagination...you can never quite forget them." http://www.feedbooks.com/book/673.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/673.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/673.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/673.mobi Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1469 urn:isbn:1593083653 en 1848 Novels “I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a year,” observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the wickedest—and most appealing—women in all of literature. Becky is just one of the many fascinating figures that populate William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, a wonderfully satirical panorama of upper-middle-class life and manners in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Scorned for her lack of money and breeding, Becky must use all her wit, charm and considerable sex appeal to escape her drab destiny as a governess. From London’s ballrooms to the battlefields of Waterloo, the bewitching Becky works her wiles on a gallery of memorable characters, including her lecherous employer, Sir Pitt, his rich sister, Miss Crawley, and Pitt’s dashing son, Rawdon, the first of Becky’s misguided sexual entanglements. Filled with hilarious dialogue and superb characterizations, Vanity Fair is a richly entertaining comedy that asks the reader, “Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?” http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1469.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1469.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1469.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1469.mobi Home of the Gentry Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1923 en 1859 Novels http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1923.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1923.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1923.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1923.mobi Fathers and Sons Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1922 urn:isbn:0192833928 en 1862 Novels When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle's discomfort, by a strange friend "who doesn't acknowledge any authorities, who doesn't accept a single principle on faith." Turgenev's masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when it was published in 1862 and continues today to seem as fresh and outspoken as it did to those who first encountered its nihilistic hero. http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1922.png http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1922.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1922.epub http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1922.mobi