Ruth is a young orphaned girl who works in a sweatshop. Mrs. Mason, Ruth's boss, runs the sweatshop in a respectable manner, earning a sterling reputation among her employees and society. However, the comfort and acclaim of Ruth's job is threatened when she attends a ball to repair any dresses that get torn during dancing. There, she meets an aristocratic man named Henry Bellingham, who is infamous for his immoral treatment of women and frivolous...

Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...

A mild heart attack confronts Penelope Stern with her own mortality, and she decides to return to the small town of Porthkerris on the coast of Cornwall. There she will visit the scenes of her famous father's artistic life.

"Jane Austen's final novel is her most mature and wickedly satirical. It follows the story of Anne Elliott, a teenager engaged to a seemingly ideal man, Frederick Wentworth. But after being persuaded by her friend Lady Russell that he is too poor to be a suitable match, Anne ends their engagement. When they are reacquainted eight years later, their circumstances are transformed: Frederick is returning triumphantly from the Napoleonic War, while Anne's...

This novel, originally written in 1916, published in 1921, explores the lives of the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and their developing love affairs with Rupert Birkin, an intellectual, and Gerald Crich, an industrialist. The despair of one sister's relationship contrasts with the happiness of the other's as the four clash in thought, passion, and belief, in their search for a life that is truly complete. The novel is the sequel to The Rainbow....

1932. After the Great War took both her beloved brother and her fiancé, Violet Speedwell has become a "surplus woman," one of a generation doomed to a life of spinsterhood after the war killed so many young men. Yet Violet cannot reconcile herself to a life spent caring for her grieving, embittered mother. After countless meals of boiled eggs and dry toast, she saves enough to move out of her mother's place and into the town of Winchester, home...

The fictional account of Bridget Jones, a 30-something Singleton who is certain she would have all the answers if she could just lose seven pounds, stop smoking, and develop Inner Poise.

Promoting themselves from genteel poverty to fame, two beautiful sisters, one a daring fashion designer and the other a writer of scandalous novels, become each other's most staunch supporter and harshest critic in the face of misunderstandings and confidences.

Abandoned pregnant and penniless on the teeming streets of London, 16-year-old Amber St. Clare manages, by using her wits, beauty, and courage, to climb to the highest position a woman could achieve in Restoration England that of favorite mistress of the Merry Monarch, Charles II. From whores and highwaymen to courtiers and noblemen, from events such as the Great Plague and the Fire of London to the intimate passions of ordinary and extraordinary...

Jane Gardam, author of the Old Filth Trilogy, delivers another modern classic in The Flight of the Maidens. With her characteristic wit, Gardam captures a moment in time for three young women on the cusp of adulthood. With keen perception the novel charts the course of this trio as they boldly face their uncertain futures.
It is Yorkshire, 1946. The end of the war has changed the world again, and
emboldened by this new dawning...