One of Henry James' greatest novels, The Ambassadors is a dark comedy from 1903.

Thomas Hardy's final novel Jude the Obscure explores notions of class, religion, marriage and modernization through its protagonist Jude Fawley, a working-class man who dreams of being a scholar.

Pierre and Jean is a short realist novel by Guy de Maupassant.

You, my love, will be poor, so as to be more like all other women. In order for us to live together I shall work all day and so be your servant.

Published in 1901, M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud is an early last man science fiction novel.

According to the great horror writer H.P. Lovecraft The Ghost Pirates . . . is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils.

In a Glass Darkly collects together five short stories from gothic horror and mystery writer Sheridan Le Fanu.

Liza of Lambeth (1897) narrates Liza's last four months alive.

Miles Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career as a romance to entertain her friends.

A Princess of Mars is the first in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series. This science fiction planetary romance, packed full of dangerous feats and swordplay, is set on a dying Mars.

Thomas Hardy (1840 1928) was a naturalist and writer, whose fiction sits on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution and is filled with an imminent sense of nostalgia for the coming transformation of the British countryside.

Dead Souls is a socially critical black comedy.

Death consists in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing.

Creative Unity is a collection of essays from Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore, who in 1913 became Asia's first recipient of the Nobel Prize.

Student! Your life is your own. You have only yourself to thank for what you are, have been and will be.

First published in 1886, The Bostonians is one of James' wittiest social satires.

Washington Square by Henry James is the story of the gentle, dull Catherine Sloper who falls for the ambivalent Morris Townsend, who her father believes is a fortune hunter.

The niece of James Fenimore Cooper and a good friend and correspondent of Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson was a well known short story writer in the later part of the 19th century.

It was in the year 1869 that impressed with the degree in which, even during the last twenty years, when the world seemed wholly occupied with other matters.

This is a guide-book to joy. It is for the use of the sad, the bored, the tired, anxious, disheartened and disappointed.