The world of Hans Christian Andersen is seen through the eyes of children. There is the everyday wonder of an ugly duckling being transformed into a swan; the puffed-up Emperor being fooled by his own importance...
Published 10 years after Collins’s most popular novel The Woman in White, Man and Wife centres on the confused and inequitable marriage laws of 19th-century Britain, reflecting the author’s own antipathy towards the institution. The plot follows the fortunes...
Here are the universal themes of love and hate, ambition and despair, youth and age, expressed with a swirling vitality which makes the book as accessible today as it was when it was first published in 1869.
Appearing in 1854, Hide and Seek was Wilkie Collins’s third published novel. At the centre of the plot is the mystery surrounding a deaf and dumb girl known as Madonna, whom the painter Valentine Blyth rescues from her life as a circus performer. But it is...
Audiobook The Law and the Lady, written by Wilkie Collins. Incorrectly signing her name in the marriage registry leads Valeria Woodville to discover further disturbing information about her husband, Eustace Macallan. Each revelation leads to further questions...
Romeo and Juliet is the play which, in English literature at least, effectively invented the modern love story. Its charm and its power derive from the romantic setting (Verona, an Italian Renaissance city), the youthful innocence and ardour of the lovers,...
Filled with wit and humour, Nesbit’s 1902 fantasy tells the adventure of five siblings sent to spend the summer with their uncle. One day, when the children wander from the strange house by the sea to play in old gravel pits, they uncover ‘It’ – a prehistoric...
Jane Austen’s most popular novel, originally published in 1813, some 17 years after it was first written, presents the Bennet family of Longbourn. Against the background of gossipy Mrs Bennet and the detached Mr Bennet, the quest is on for husbands for the...