The Professor, Charlotte Bronte

While staying in Bath, Catherine meets Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor who invite her to their family estate, Northanger Abbey. A fan of Gothic Romance novels, naive Catherine is soon letting her imagination run wild in the atmospheric abbey, fuelled by her friendship with the vivacious Isabella Thorpe.

When a strange, meteor-like object lands in the heart of England, the inhabitants of Earth find themselves victims of a terrible attack. A ruthless race of Martians, armed with heat rays and poisonous smoke, is intent on destroying everything that stands in its way. 

When a sudden collision rips a hole in the ship’s hull, the ferry sinks like a stone, throwing the literary critic into the icy harbor. Rescued by the Ghost, a seal-hunting vessel, van Weyden counts his blessings. Little does he know he’s boarded a ship bound straight for hell.

In the most renowned onstage law scene of all time, Portia proves herself one of Shakespeare’s most cunning heroines, disguising herself as a lawyer and vanquishing Shylock’s claims; meanwhile, Shylock triumphs on a humanitarian level with his plea for tolerance: ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’

Little orphan Heidi is sent to live with her grandfather in his remote house in the Swiss Alps. She soon begins to love her life with her grandfather and makes friends with Peter, the goat-herder and his grandmother. Idyllic as her existence is, her aunt sends Heidi to live in Frankfurt to become a companion to the invalid daughter of a wealthy family...

Disenchanted with her husband and seeking an escape from their dull marriage she is soon tempted into a brief romantic liaison with another man. Although short-lived, she remains desirous of passion and the finer things in life and embarks on another affair, destroying her reputation.

Ivanhoe returns from the Crusades in secret and is joined in his plans to re-establish Richard on the thrown by the moneylender Isaac of York, his daughter Rebecca, the mysterious Black Knight, Lady Rowena, and Robin Hood and his merry men.

These witty vignettes, set in Charlotte Brontë's imaginary world of Angria, feature debauched aristocrats, high-society courtesans and the rakish, brooding hero Zamorna, and offer a fascinating insight into Brontë's early writing.

Set in fictitious Coketown, England during the Industrial Revolution of the 1850s, Dickens wished to expose the enormous gulf between the rich and poor through his writing. In Hard Times, the social and moral purpose of his work is at its most evident.

Jacob's Room (1922), Woolf's third novel, marks the bold affirmation of her own voice and search for a new form to express her view that `the human soul ... orientates itself afresh every now & then. It is doing so now. No one can see it whole therefore.' Jacob's life is presented in subtle, delicate and tantalising glimpses, the novel's gaps and...

However human joy is not excluded thanks to ‘Mr Sleary’s Horse-Riding’ circus, a gin-soaked and hilarious troupe of open-hearted and affectionate people who act as an antidote to all the drudgery and misery endured by the ordinary citizens of Coketown.

Adventurous and spirited in tone, The Three Musketeers is considered one of the greatest historical French novels. When Athos, Porthos and Aramis befriend a young and determined country boy d’Artagnan, together they confront the scheming King’s Minister, Cardinal Richelieu and the female spy Milady who threaten to undermine the King.

Dramatic and powerful in its scope, Othello explores the perils of suspicion and jealousy and the ensuing breakdown of relationships and disaster that can arise from such emotions. Othello, a revered soldier, secretly marries Desdemona, the daughter of a Venetian senator, but is led to believe that she has been unfaithful to him by his ensign, Iago,...

After taking an elixir created in his laboratory, mild mannered Dr Jekyll is transformed into the cruel and despicable Mr Hyde. Although seemingly harmless at first, things soon descend into chaos and Jekyll quickly realises there is only one way to stop Hyde.

 In From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, Jules Verne turned the ancient fantasy of space flight into a believable technological possibility an engineering dream for the industrial age. 

A selection of Austen's dark and hilarious early writings - featuring murder, drunkenness, perjury, theft, poisoning, women breaking out of prison, men forging wills and babies biting off their mothers' fingers..