The first volume of Proust’s seven-part novel “In Search of Lost Time,” also known as “A Remembrance of Things Past,” “Swann’s Way” is the auspicious beginning of Proust’s most prominent work. A mature, unnamed man recalls the details of his commonplace, idyllic existence as a sensitive and intuitive boy in Combray. For a time, the story is narrated through his younger mind in beautiful, almost dream-like prose. In a subsequent section of the vo ...
First published posthumously in 1817, “Northanger Abbey” was actually the first finished novel that Jane Austen wrote. It is the story of seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, one of ten children of a country clergyman, who imagines life as living in one of the Gothic novels with which she is excessively fond of reading. When she is invited by her wealthy neighbors, the Fullertons, to accompany them to the spa town of Bath she experiences her fi ...
Originally serialized between March 1869 and June 1870, Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” is one of the greatest underwater sea adventures of all time. It is the story of Professor Pierre Aronnax who sets off aboard an American frigate to investigate a series of attacks, which has been reported to be made by an amphibious monster. The monster in question is actually the submarine vessel the ‘Nautilus,’ which is commanded by t ...
“The Awakening” is the story of Edna Pontellier, an attractive young wife and the mother of two sons living in the Creole south in the late 19th century. Edna feels herself trapped in a marriage where she is unable to express her passionate sensuality and as a result explores a spiritual and sexual awakening through an affair with a younger man during one summer while her husband is away. Liberated by this experience she sends her children away ...
First published in 1884, "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” is English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott’s classic work of science fiction. With the use of a geometric theme, Abbott weaves the fascinating tale of “A Square”, an inhabitant of “Flatland”, a two-dimensional world where women are portrayed as simple line-segments and men are represented as polygons whose social status is determined by the number and regularity of their sides. Through ...
First published serially between 1859 and 1860, “The Woman in White” is Wilkie Collins’s epistolary novel that tells the tale of Walter Hartright, who encounters a woman all dressed in white on a moonlit road in Hampstead. Hartright helps the woman to find her way back to London. The woman warns him against an unnamed baronet and after they part he discovers that she may have escaped from an insane asylum. Hartright travels to Cumberland where h ...
A parody of traveler’s tales and a satire of human nature, “Gulliver’s Travels” is Jonathan Swift’s most famous work which was first published in 1726. An immensely popular tale ever since its original publication, “Gulliver’s Travels” is the story of its titular character, Lemuel Gulliver, a man who loves to travel. A series of four journeys are detailed in which Gulliver finds himself in a number of amusing and precarious situations. In the fi ...
First published in 1883, Howard Pyle’s “The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood” is arguably the most popular rendering of the legend of Robin Hood, the yeoman-thief of Sherwood Forest. Each chapter offers new and exciting stories, including the famous scenes of Little John and his staff besting Robin on the bridge, Robin winning the golden arrow at the Sheriff of Nottingham’s archery contest, his complicity with courageous Will Scarlet and musical A ...
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, Italy in the middle of the 13th century and what is principally known of him comes from his own writings. One of the world’s great literary masterpieces, the “Divine Comedy” is at its heart an allegorical tale regarding man’s search for divinity. The work is divided into three sections, “Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” and “Paradiso,” each containing thirty-three cantos. It is the narrative of a journey down through ...
