Contains three short works that show the author experimenting with a variety of different literary styles, from melodrama to satire, and exploring a range of social classes and settings. This title features Lady Susan , The Watsons and Sanditon .

The love of place is endemic in English literature, from the work of the earliest poets and hermits to the suburban celebrations of John Betjeman, covering all varieties of the British rural and urban landscape. This book presents an image of Britain as seen by writers of different regions and periods.

A new edition of the bestselling Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, this wide-ranging compact guide to literature has been fully revised and updated. Now includes increased coverage of world literature. Indispensable for English students, teachers, and anyone else who loves literature.

Twenty-one, passionate and headstrong, Ann Veronica Stanley is determined to live her own life. When her father forbids her from attending a fashionable Ball, she decides she has no choice but to leave her family home and make a fresh start in London.

It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes pregnant as a result of a one night stand. Although single parenthood is still not socially acceptable, she chooses to have the baby.

Considered by Hartley to be his finest work, 'Simonetta Perkins' is a brilliantly observed tale of desire and guilt. Set against a glorious Venetian backdrop, it explores the very nature of physical temptation, to create a complex, psychological work, deeply reminiscent of Henry James.

200 years after being plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea, the Red Queen's ghost decides to set the record straight about her extraordinary existence - and Dr Babs Halliwell, with her own complicated past, is the perfect envoy. Why does the Red Queen pick Babs to keep her story alive, and what else does she want from her? A terrific novel set in 18th century Korea and the pre

Humphrey and Ailsa meet by a grey, northern sea. Humphrey is quiet, serious; Ailsa is angry, a freckled cobra ready to strike. Yet they fascinate one another and when they meet again years later they fall briefly in love. Half a lifetime passes before their paths finally re-cross. What will each make of their past? And of the future?

200 years after being plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea, the Red Queen's ghost decides to set the record straight about her extraordinary existence, and Dr Babs Halliwell, with her own complicated past, is the perfect envoy.

Features entries on key topics including black British literature, fantasy fiction, and modernism. This work places English literature in a wide context and offers an extensive exploration of the classical roots of English literature, and the European and non-European works and writers that have influenced its development.

A portrait of four generations of one family, this story explores themes of inheritance, DNA, the individual's place in history and fate. It spans from Bessie Bawtry, a small child living in a Yorkshire mining town in 1905, to her granddaughter, listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance.

Explains the jigsaw puzzle. This book combines the jigsaw history and the strange delights of puzzling. It describes the history of this British form of meditation, from its earliest incarnation as a dissected map, used as a teaching tool in the late eighteenth century, to the other cut-outs and mosaics that have amused children and adults.

Liz, Alix and Esther are old friends whose lives continue to cross and uncross. As the years pass, they are more than ever disposed to question, to re-evaluate, to examine their motives and directions in the brutally prosperous, atrocity-hungry society of Britain.

Features musings on wine and hashish that provide psychological insight into the mind of the addict. This book asserts the ambivalence of memory, urging a union of willpower and sensual pleasure as it claims that wine and hashish bring about an escape of narrative time.

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Melville's 'The Enchanted Isles' is a descriptive work written following a tour of the Galapagos - the islands that formed the inspiration for Charles Darwin's early work on evolutionary theory.

The love of place is endemic in English literature, from the work of the earliest poets and hermits to the suburban celebrations of John Betjeman, covering all varieties of the British rural and urban landscape. This book presents an image of Britain as seen by writers of different regions and periods, and also illuminates the way in which their work has changed our visual attitudes, our taste in

A Personal History with Jigsaws. Author Margaret Drabble explores the history of the jigsaw alongside her own personal pursuit of what Boswell called the 'innocent soothing relief from melancholy' found in puzzles and board games. Alongside eighteenth-century 'dissected maps', the intricate word-play of George Perec, and the world's hardest five-thousand-piece jigsaw - a Jackson Pollock painting -

Candida Wilton arrives in London broke, divorced and rejected, yet somehow filled with a strange sense of excitement. Secretly convinced that despite all, she is a lucky person, she is proved right with an unexpected windfall. To broaden her horizons, she plans a trip abroad.

Louise marries the wealthy but unappealing novelist Stephen Halifax, and her sister Sarah, graduated from Oxford, is thrown back into family affairs. As the cracks begin to show in Louise's marriage and rumours of infidelity spread, Sarah discovers that, beneath her cool exterior, her sister is not quite the person she thought she was.