Greenhouse Classics: 26 books

The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise attributed to Sun Tzu (also referred to as "Sun Wu" and "Sunzi"), a high-ranking military general, strategist and tactician, and it was believed to have been compiled during the late Spring and Autumn period or early Warring...

Emma, by Jane Austen, is a novel about youthful hubris and the perils of misconstrued romance. The novel was first published in December 1815. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian-Regency England; she also creates a lively comedy...

EVEN at this distance of time, the genuine devotee of Jane Austen must be conscious of a futile, but irresistible, desire to 'feel the bumps' of that Boeotian bookseller of Bath, who—having bought the manuscript of Northanger Abbey for the base price of ten pounds—refrained from putting it before...

The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come is a Christian allegory written by John Bunyan and published in February, 1678. It is regarded as one of the most significant works of religious English literature, has been translated into more than 200 languages, and has never been...

When a child has once read of Prince Agib, of Gulnare or Periezade, Sinbad or Codadad, in this or any other volume of its kind, the magic will have been instilled into the blood, for the Oriental flavour in the Arab tales is like nothing so much as magic. True enough they are a vast storehouse of...

With the title of Sense and Sensibility is connected one of those minor problems which delight the cummin-splitters of criticism. In the Cecilia of Madame D'Arblay—the forerunner, if not the model, of Miss Austen—is a sentence which at first sight suggests some relationship to the name of the...

Mansfield Park is a novel by Jane Austen, written at Chawton Cottage between February 1811 and 1813. It was published in May 1814 by Thomas Egerton, who published Jane Austen's two earlier novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. When the novel reached a second edition in 1816, its publication was taken over by John Murray, who also published its successor, Emma.

Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England. Elizabeth is the second...

Persuasion was one of the three novels written between February l811 and August 1816. As the manuscript was subscribed "Finish, July 18, 1816," It is probable that it was written later than Emma and Mansfield Park. It appears from The Memoir, moreover, that it was not finally completed in...

REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM was first published October 7, 1903. Within a few days its popularity was assured, and within seven years it has attained the extraordinary sale of 337,000 copies, without the aid of either illustrations or sensational advertising. No book of recent years has succeeded in...

Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens. The story is about an orphan, Oliver Twist, who endures a miserable existence in a workhouse and then is placed with an undertaker. He escapes and travels to London where he meets the Artful Dodger,...

As the Old Curiosity Shop grew out of a short story which Charles Dickens had begun with the half-formed notion of Little Nell and the Grandfather in his mind, so Great Expectations arose out of similarly modest beginnings. In 1860 he wrote to Mr. Forster, " for a little piece I have been writing—or...

As an example of Dickens 's literary work, A Tale of Two Cities is not wrongly named. It is his most typical contact with the civil ideals of Europe. All his other tales have been tales of one city. He was in spirit a Cockney; though that title has been quite unreasonably twisted to mean a cad. By...

Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, published in 20 monthly instalments between March 1852 and September 1853. It is held to be one of Dickens's finest novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots in his entire canon. The story is told...