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This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of Surrey, England. A charming young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a fellow Britisher when she witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza. Attracted to this man, George Emerson--who is entirely unsuitable and whose father just may be a Socialist--Lucy is soon at war with the...
3) Persuasion
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"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...
4) Emma
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"The culmination of Jane Austen's genius, a sparkling comedy of love and marriage--now in a stunning 200th-anniversary Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition Beautiful, clever, rich--and single--Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to...
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Jane Austen's first published novel, sparkling with wit and artistry, captures the inequities of birth, class, and marriage faced by the sisters Dashwood. Published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility has delighted generations of readers with its masterfully crafted portrait of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Forced to leave their home after their father's death, Elinor and Marianne must rely on making good marriages as their means of support....
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When young Fanny Price comes to live with her aunt and uncle Bertram at Mansfield Park, it is because of the outcast state of her own parents. Her dreadful aunt and three cousins become her enemies, making her life miserable and causing Fanny to grow up quiet and shy. When the arrival of the Crawfords upsets the Bertram household, the young people become involved in dangerous plots to marry to better their station. Fanny has fallen in love with her...
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When Elizabeth Bennet meets Fitzwilliam Darcy for the first time at a ball, she writes him off as an arrogant and obnoxious man. He not only acts like an insufferable snob, but she also overhears him rejecting the very idea of asking her for a dance! As life pits them against each other again and again, Darcy begins to fall for Elizabeth's wit and intelligence and Elizabeth begins to question her feelings about Darcy. But when Darcy saves her youngest...
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"The summer after university, Emma Woodhouse returns home to the village of Highbury, where she will live with her health-conscious father until she is ready to launch her interior-design business and strike out on her own. In the meantime, she will do what she does best: offer guidance to those less wise in the ways of the world than herself. Happily, this summer brings many new faces to Highbury and into the sphere of Emma's not always perfectly...
10) Middlemarch
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Set in a provincial Victorian neighborhood, the author explores the complex social relationship and the struggle to hold fast to personal tragedy in a materialistic environment.
13) The country life
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Winner of England's Whitbread Award for Saving Agnes and the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award, Rachel Cusk has won popular and critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. This young British author's beguiling novel is both poignant and hilarious. When Stella leaves London for a small village in Sussex, she hopes that the country life will be conducive to her journey toward self-discovery. She'll have no more insipid lover, dead end job, or controlling...
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In 1854, beautiful, adventurous Rosa Barr travels to the Crimean battlefield with Florence Nightingale's nursing corps--then disappears without a trace. When Mariella Lingwood, Rosa's cousin, leaves her surgeon husband's side to follow the trail of her elusive cousin to Sebastopol, she encounters Rosa's dashing stepbrother, a reckless cavalry officer whose complex past -- and future -- is inextricably bound up with her own.
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When Beth disappears, everyone says she's run off with another man. She's just a fly-by-night party girl who can't be trusted. But Natalie, her best friend, doesn't believe it, not at all. She's sure something more sinister is going on. So sure that proving it just might kill her ... Meanwhile, Victor, one of Beth's and Nat's favorite bar patrons, has fallen and ended up in the hospital. When he hears that Beth is gone, he doesn't buy it either. And...
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"Manchester 1809. When budding young criminal Mary Jebb swindles Michael Croxton's brother with a blank pound note, he chases her into the night and sets in motion a train of sinister events. Condemned to seven years of transportation to Australia, Mary sends him a 'Penny Heart'-a token of her vow of revenge. Two years later, Michael marries naive young Grace Moore. Although initially overjoyed at the union, Grace quickly realizes that her husband...