In America, in 1770, a well-defined aristocracy held control.

Soils and national characters differ; but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is a crime novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle starring the great detective of Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes. Wealthy landowner Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead in the parkland surrounding his manor.

Nations yet to come will look back upon his history as to some grand and supernatural romance.

This fascinating travelogue details the visit of author Ellen Clacy to the massive gold mines that were erected in Australia in the nineteenth century.

A remarkable writer and intellectual in her own right, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley first encountered the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was only a teenager. After fathering three of her children, Shelley drowned during a storm.

A beautiful young man, Dorian Gray, sits for a portrait. In the garden of the artist's house he falls into conversation with Lord Wotton.

The Importance of Being Earnest is the last play Oscar Wilde ever wrote, and remains his most enduringly popular.

Jane Eyre is raised in her aunt's house after the death of her parents.

Causing mass hysteria as listeners of its 1938 radio broadcast believed a Martian invasion of Earth really was taking place, H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds is perhaps the most famous novel of its genre.

Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Arms and the Man was George Bernard Shaw's first commercially successful play.

Oscar Wilde's play An Ideal Husband is a comedy about politics, blackmail and corruption.

The following book consists of brief biographical commentaries about Beethoven, each followed by sections of quotations attributed to the muse.

Leaves of Grass is a collection of poems by Walt Whitman originally published in 1855 at the poet's own expense.

The Land That Time Forgot is an Edgar Rice Burroughs science fiction novel that starts out as a nerve-wracking wartime naval adventure but develops into the story of a unique and mysterious prehistoric lost world.

Notes from the Underground is Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1864 masterpiece following the ranting, slightly unhinged memoir of an isolated, anonymous civil servant.

The Return of Tarzan is Edgar Rice Burroughs' third novel in the series starring the man raised by apes. First serialized in 1914 in All-Story Cavalier magazine, it was published as a novel in 1916.

There never was anybody, wrote the Spectator, who had adventures as well as Miss Bird.

Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, from 1871, is a children's novel that is often put in the genre literary nonsense.