Wanda McCaddon

The first and most successful in the Baroness's series of books that feature Percy Blakeney, who leads a double life as an English fop and a swashbuckling rescuer of aristocrats, "The Scarlet Pimpernel" was the blueprint for what became known as the masked-avenger genre. As Anne Perry writes in her Introduction, the novel "has almost reached its first centenary, and it is as vivid and appealing as ever because the plotting is perfect. It is a classic...

Traces the story of a scandalous trial that rocked Victorian England, describing how Isabella Robinson recorded sexual fantasies in her private diary, which was discovered and read by her husband, who petitioned for divorce on the grounds of adultery.

John Dolittle is a highly respected doctor in the village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, yet he loves animals so much that his house is soon full of them. With all his patients scared away, and the expense of feeding his menagerie mounting, a friend suggests that the Doctor become a vet instead. With the help of Polynesia the parrot, Doctor Dolittle swiftly learns the language of the animals so that he can talk to all of his new patients. However, when...

'I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.' Becky Sharp is sharp, calculating, and determined to succeed. Craving wealth and a position in society, she charms, hoodwinks, manipulates everyone she meets, rising in the world as she attaches herself to a succession of rich men. Becky's fortunes are contrasted with those of her best friend Amelia, who has none of Becky's wit and vitality but whose gentle-heartedness attracts the devotion...

The Voyage Out (1915) is the story of a rite of passage. When Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship she is launched on a course of self-discovery in a modern version of the mythic voyage. Virginia Woolf knew all too well the forms that she was supposed to follow when writing of a young lady's entrance into the world, and she struggled to subvert the conventions, wittily and assiduously, rewriting and revising the novel many...

Presents the nineteenth-century novel of Regency England that centers upon a self-assured young lady who is determined to arrange her life and the lives of those around her into a pattern dictated by her romantic fancy.

They were teachers, students, chemists, writers, and housewives—a singer at the Paris Opera, a midwife, a dental surgeon. They distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, printed subversive newspapers, hid resisters, spirited Jews to safety, transported weapons, and conveyed clandestine messages. The youngest was a schoolgirl of fifteen who scrawled "V" for victory on the walls of her lycée; the eldest, a farmer's wife in her sixties who harbored escaped

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This is the story of the savage, tormented foundling Heathcliff, who falls wildly in love with Catherine Earnshaw, the daughter of his benefactor, and the violence and misery that result from their thwarted longing for each other. A book of great power and strength, it is filled with the raw beauty of the moors and an uncanny understanding of the terrible truths about men and women. It is an understanding made even more extraordinary by the fact...

Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857; she was 18, a hard-working actress performing in his production of The Frozen Deep, and he was 45, the most lionized writer in England. Out of their meeting came a love affair that lasted thirteen years and destroyed Dickens's marriage while effacing Nelly Ternan from the public record. In this remarkable work of biography and scholarly reconstruction, the acclaimed biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas...

"The Great War is over and jobs are scarce. Tommy Beresford and Prudence "Tuppence" Cowley, who were friends before the war, run into each other in London and discover they are both equally short of money and opportunities. On a whim, they decide to start a business, advertising themselves as "The Young Adventurers." Their first job leads them into a series of increasingly dangerous situations involving international spies, a society beauty, a Russian...