Penguin Popular Classics

A Midsummer Night`s Dream

Escaping the Athenian court to marry, Hermia and Lysander take refuge in a nearby wood. There, too, are Helena and Demetrius and the King and Queen of the fairies, Oberon and Titania. Oberon orchestrates a series of...

A Woman of No Importance

Oscar Wilde's genius is to the fore in this witty, audacious comedy of Victorian manners. A house party is in full swing at Lady Hunstanton's stately country home. One of the guests is Gerard Arbuthnot, an...

Agnes Grey

"Agnes Grey" is the touching story of a young girl who decides to enter the world as a governess, but whose bright illusions of acceptance, freedom and friendship are gradually destroyed. Drawing on her own...

Far From The Madding Crowd

Bathsheba Everdene is the proud, capricious and handsome heroine of "Far from the Madding Crowd". Thomas Hardy`s richly evocative novel opens with the arrival of Bathsheba in the village of Weatherbury to work the...

Great Expectations

C. Dickens

"Great Expectations" opens unforgettably in a twilit and overgrown churchyard on the eerie Kent marshes. There the orphan Pip is disturbed to meet an escaped convict, Magwitch, but gives him food, in an encounter that...

Great Expectations

There the orphan Pip is disturbed to meet an escaped convict, Magwitch, but gives him food, in an encounter that is to haunt both their lives. How Pip receives riches from a mysterious benefactor, snobbishly abandons...

King Lear

One of the later plays, "King Lear" is such a powerful depiction of suffering and redemption it is now thought by many to be Shakespeare's greatest creation. When King Lear abdicates his throne and divides his...

Madame Bovary

Emma Rouault leaves her father to marry Charles Bovary, an insignificant local doctor, and to live among the bourgeoisie of Yonville. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, Emma fills her head with fantastic...

Much Ado about Nothing

Pride and Prejudice

J. Austen

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" The opening of Jane Austen`s ever - popular novel sets the tone of her sparkling comedy of manners...

Sense and Sensibility

J. Austen

Unfairly deprived of their family inheritance by the grasping Mrs John Dashwood and her husband, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood and their mother find themselves in greatly reduced circumstances. Compelled to leave...

Silas Marner

George Eliot`s own favourite novel centres on Silas Marner, the linen weaver of Raveloe, a village on the brink of industrialization. Once he was a respected member of a narrow congregation, but the events that took...

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Action-packed and crammed with vibrant characters and incidents, Huckleberry Finn catches more vividly than any other novel the comedy, terror, resilience and spontaneity of boyhood. More than a mere sequel to Tom...

The Europeans

Eugenia`s wit, guile and sophistication, and Felix`s debonair vivacity form an uneasy alliance with the Puritan morality and the frugal, domestic virtues of the Americans. A rich and delicately balanced comedy of...

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

It tells the story of Quasimodo, the hunchback bellringer of Notre-Dame Cathedral and his devotion to the beautiful gypsy dancer, La Esmeralda. When the demented archdeacon Frollo sets out to abduct La Esmeralda, he...

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

V. Hugo

It tells the story of Quasimodo, the hunchback bellringer of Notre-Dame Cathedral and his devotion to the beautiful gypsy dancer, La Esmeralda. When the demented archdeacon Frollo sets out to abduct La Esmeralda, he...

The Mill On The Floss

Ardent, impulsive, thirsty for knowledge, Maggie Tulliver is one of the great heroines of literature. George Eliot drew on her own anguished childhood when she depicted the stormy relationship between Maggie and Tom...

The Moonstone

The Moonstone, a large, beautiful yet fated diamond, was stolen from an Indian shrine. It is given to Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday and, that same night, stolen again. Sergeant Cuff is employed by...

The Merchant of Venice

Antonio, the merchant of Venice, and Shylock the money-lender have struck a bargain whereby Shylock will lend Antonio some money provided that if Antonio cannot repay him, Shylock can claim a pound of Antonio`s flesh....

The Turn Of The Screw

The new governess is in sole charge of two orphan children. Although they are both remarkably well-behaved, intelligent and affectionate, she becomes increasingly uneasy. Especially after she sees a stranger seemingly...

The Wind in the Willows

When the Mole escapes from the tedium of spring cleaning and embarks on a new life on the River Bank with his friend the Water Rat, he has little idea of the adventures ahead of him. And the greatest adventures of all...

Twelfth Night