Henry Archibald Hertzberg Lawson was an Australian writer and poet. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's "greatest short story writer".

Liber Amoris is unlike anything Hazlitt wrote and probably like nothing you've come across before. On the face of it it tells the story of Hazlitt's infatuation with his landlords daughter. Hazlitt was middle aged and she young and pretty, a bit of a coquette from the sound of it. It turned out badly for Hazlitt and the book tells the story of this doomed love. Critics have always been divided about the merit of the piece. Even those who see its merit often feel more comfortable with his polished literary works, and perhaps rightly so...

Ellen Wood (1814-1887) was an English novelist, better known as Mrs. Henry Wood. She wrote over 30 novels, many of which (especially East Lynne which was a Victorian best seller and is still sometimes performed as a drama) enjoyed remarkable popularity. Lady Isabel Carlyle, a beautiful and refined young woman, leaves her hard-working but neglectful lawyer-husband and her infant children to elope with an aristocratic suitor. After he deserts her, and she bears their illegitimate child, Lady Isabel disguises herself and takes the position of governess in the household of her husband and his new wife". Summary by Wikipedia

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, despite an impressive record of productivity and creativity as a novelist, playwright, short fiction writer, editor, actress, and singer, is an African-American woman writer who has essentially been consigned to the dustbins of American literary history. Though contemporary with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hopkins is only now beginning to receive the kind of critical attention that Harper has enjoyed for a slightly longer period and that Chesnutt and Dunbar have always had...

I have to thank all the previous students of Shelley as poet and man--not last nor least among whom is my husband--for their loving and truthful research on all the subjects surrounding the life of Mrs.Shelley. -Lucy Madox Brown Rossetti Mrs. Shelley is a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, author of Frankenstein and other works, wife of Percy Shelley, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin who penned The Vindication of the Rights of Women, and daughter of William Godwin, a philosopher and novelist...

Miss Mayor tells this story with singular skill, more by contrast than by drama, bringing her chief character into relief against her world, as it passes in swift procession. Her tale is in a form becoming common among our best writers; it is compressed into a space about a third as long as the ordinary novel, yet form and manner are so closely suited that all is told and nothing seems slightly done, or worked with too rapid a hand.

As every Christmas for the last 20 years, the Little Gray Lady lights a candle in her room and spends the evening alone, thinking of a great mistake she has made so long ago. This year, however, things are to play out differently..

A seminal essay on the development of horror as a genre, highly influential on later writers.

From the comfort of the hills of Kentucky traveled Celia and her husband Seth to the desolate prairies of Kansas, where cyclones, tornadoes, and endless wind were to greet them. Always, there was the wind cutting across the plains as the young couple builds their home while working the soil, while Seth awaits the wise men of the east to begin building the magic city where he has staked his territory on the plains. But sometimes life plays cruel tricks upon us. Sometimes our hopes are dashed by happenstance...

This warm, affectionate duet of essays by two of the early twentieth century's most popular writers is a bit dated but still entertaining.

Charlotte Temple, a cautionary tale for young women, follows the unfortunate adventures of the eponymous heroine as she is seduced by a dashing soldier, Montraville. Influenced by both her lover and an unruly teacher at her boarding school, she is persuaded to run away to America, where she is eventually abandoned by Montraville after he becomes bored, leaving her alone and pregnant. First published in England in 1791, it went on to become America's bestselling novel, only being ousted by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The Plastic Age (1924) is a novel by Percy Marks, which tells the story of co-eds at a fictional college called Sanford. With contents that covered or implied hazing, partying, and "petting", the book sold well enough to be the second best-selling novel of 1924. The following year, it was adapted into a film of the same name, starring Clara Bow.

"I am very glad that "The Story of the Seven Who Were Hanged" will be read in English. The misfortune of us all is that we know so little, even nothing, about one another—neither about the soul, nor the life, the sufferings, the habits, the inclinations, the aspirations of one another. Literature, which I have the honor to serve, is dear to me just because the noblest task it sets before itself is that of wiping out boundaries and distances."-- Leonid Andreyev, in a letter to Herman Bernstein

Botchan is the story of a young math teacher from Tokyo whose first assignment takes him to a middle school in the country side. His arrival there is not very lucky: The pupils are bound to test his perseverance and cheerily comments every one of his perceived missteps. In the teacher's room, he soon finds himself in the middle of an intrigue between the jovial "Porcupine" and the fat "Hubbard Squash" on one side, and the effeminate "Red Shirt" and his follower "Clown" on the other. Will Botchan choose the right side in the end? Botchan - with morality as the main theme - is one of the most popular novels in Japan...

This is a collection of ten Christmas Stories, some of which have been published before. I have added a little essay, written on the occasion of the first Christmas celebrated by the King of Italy in Rome.

Edward Everett Hale (1822 – 1909) was an American author, historian and Unitarian clergyman. Hale first came to notice as a writer in 1859, when he contributed the short story "My Double and How He Undid Me" to the Atlantic Monthly. He soon published other stories in the same periodical. His best known work was "The Man Without a Country", published in the Atlantic in 1863 and intended to strengthen support in the Civil War for the Union cause in the North. Though the story is set in the early 19th century, it is an allegory about the upheaval of the American Civil War...

Trying to get away from an engagement he had got himself into more or less against his will, Stephen Knight travels to Algiers to visit his old friend Nevill. On the Journey there he meets the charming and beautiful Victoria. She is on her way to Algiers to search for her sister, who had disappeared years ago after marrying an Arab nobleman. With the support of his friend, Stephen Knight decides to help the girl - but when she also disappears, the adventure begins...

The passengers in the sleeping car of the Rome Express were just woken and informed that they will reach Paris soon, and a general bustle fills the train. Only one passenger cannot be awoken by the porter, no matter how loudly he knocks on the compartment door. At last, when the door is forced open, the occupant of the compartment is found dead - stabbed to the heart! The murderer must be found among the passengers...

An army officer, and a mysterious lady with a maid and baby in tow, are the only passengers on the Engadine express from Calais. The lady is afraid that someone is following her. Who is she? And what is her strange package? One suspicious conversation and two private detectives later Colonel Basil Annesley is determined to find out!

May Sinclair’s 1921 novel tells the story of the ridiculous Mr. Horatio Bysshe Waddington, a pompous, self-deluded poser making his way through life caring only for the impressions he makes on others. His long-suffering wife Fanny, his secretary Barbara, and the young scapegrace Ralph watch his daily performances with delighted, affectionate fascination as if they are spectators watching a play or scientists observing a new species, wondering every day how far he will go to fulfill his outrageous pretentions. As usual, Sinclair’s light, deceptively innocent prose camouflages a tale of sexual passions and human foibles with philosophical implications about her post-war world.

Harriett Frean is a well-to-do, unmarried woman living a life of meaningless dependency, boredom, and unproductivity as she patiently cares for her aging parents, waiting for a man to marry. When her opportunity for Love finally comes, she is offered a moral dilemma: the man is engaged to her best friend. Should she sacrifice what, according to the priorities of the time, seems like her "one chance for happiness," or should she seize the moment? Can she make something meaningful of her life without...

Fascinated as she was by the lives of the Brontë siblings, May Sinclair loosely based her subtly sensual, quietly insurrectionary 1914 novel The Three Sisters on the Haworth moor milieu of the three literary Brontë sisters. Alice, Gwenda, and Mary Cartaret are the daughters of the Vicar of Garth, an abusive father with rigid, selfish expectations for female behavior. Hope of rescue seems to dawn in the person of an idealistic young doctor in the village, but this is no Austen romance. Described...

As a simple story told, "The Romantic" is one of Sinclair’s tightest and most compelling. Charlotte Redhead, a young British secretary, finds herself in a degrading extra-marital affair with her boss. In reaction, she renounces Sex and links herself platonically to a handsome young Bohemian (John Conway) she meets by chance, tramping in the fields. Together, under a powerful romantic excitement, the two rush off to Belgium in the early weeks of World War I, having organized their own little volunteer ambulance corps...

Another frank May Sinclair exploration of fin de siècle English love and sex, marriage and adultery, "The Tysons" is the story of the caddish Nevill Tyson and his beautiful but frivolous young wife Molly. Sinclair uses a different narrative voice than we hear in much of her fiction, a sort of witty Jane Austen archness as she dissects the characters of the provincial village Drayton Parva. As always, she demonstrates an intriguing mixture of Victorian prudishness and modern free-thinking, particularly in her rendering of the sexual escapades of her characters...

In May Sinclair’s remarkable first novel, Audrey Craven is a beautiful young woman who has by her idiosyncracies acquired a thoroughly undeserved reputation for originality. In fact, Audrey is a shallow, selfish, malleable person of negligible intelligence, with a fastidious horror of anyone who might be considered a nobody. Her pursuit of the stimulation of extraordinary minds (and her persistent fantasy of being somebody’s Muse) brings her into contact with serious women and men representing the profoundest passions of art, religion, science, and love...

Written in an era of cheap, formulaic romantic fiction, the nuanced, seditious, quietly erotic novels of May Sinclair stand out like literature from another era entirely. There is romance in “Anne Severn & the Fieldings,” but it’s romance of the best and profoundest kind, set in the context of authentic human personalities and tragic historical events. The motherless Anne Severn is adopted into the Fielding family and grows up in intimate friendship with the three Fielding sons, all of whom love her...

A Crystal Age is a utopian novel written by W. H. Hudson, first published in 1887. The book has been called a "significant S-F milestone" and has been noted for its anticipation of the "modern ecological mysticism" that would evolve a century later.

Hudson wrote this classic work in 1910; it is admiringly mentioned by many other writers. It focuses on the memories of a head shepherd, Caleb Bawcombe, so it is concerned with the period of mid to late nineteenth century rural Wiltshire, a county in England. This pleasant engaging book contains rural wisdom, natural history, farming practices, human characters, and more

When the first part of "Pelle Erobreren" (Pelle the Conqueror) appeared in 1906, its author, Martin Andersen Nexo, was practically unknown even in his native country, save to a few literary people who knew that he had written some volumes of stories and a book full of sunshiny reminiscences from Spain. And even now, after his great success with "Pelle," very little is known about the writer. He was born in 1869 in one of the poorest quarters of Copenhagen, but spent his boyhood in his beloved island Bornholm, in the Baltic, in or near the town, Nexo, from which his final name is derived...

Miriam Henderson is one of what novelist Dolf Wyllarde (in her great work, The Pathway of the Pioneer) termed "nous autres," i.e., young gentlewomen who must venture forth and earn their living after their fathers have been financially ruined. Also, she has read Villette; she thus applies for and is offered a job teaching conversational English at a girls' school, albeit in Germany rather than France. Pointed Roofs describes her year abroad, as she endeavors to make her way in the hotbed of seething female personalities that populate the school, overseen by her employer, the formidable Fraulein...

The House of Dust is a poem written in the four-movement format of a classical symphony. Hauntingly beautiful despite its bleak post-World War I depictions of human mortality and loss, the poem develops its movements around central images such as Japanese ukiyo-e ("floating world") woodblock prints, touching the reader's senses with endlessly evocative allusions to wind, sea, and weather. In this underlying Japanese sensibility and dependence on central perceptual images, Aiken's poem is similar to poetry of Imagists of the time such as Amy Lowell. Also deeply influenced by the concepts of modern psychology, Aiken delved deeply into individual human identity and emotion.

In this, Chesnutt's first novel, he tells the tragic story of love set against a backdrop of racism, miscegenation and “passing” during the period spanning the antebellum and reconstruction eras in American history. And through his use of the vernacular prevalent in the South of that time, Chesnutt lent a compassionate voice to a group that America did not want to hear. More broadly, however, Chesnutt illustrated, in this character play, the vast and perhaps insurmountable debt this country continues to pay for the sins of slavery.