
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre follows the story of its heroine's fearless quest to find her place in the world. An epic and intimate tale of love, tragedy, and the search for happiness in the face of overwhelming hardship, it has endured as a timeless classic beloved by generations of readers, and is now available in a limited Olive Edition from HarperPerennial.
Olive Editions are exclusive small format editions of some of our bestselling and celebrated titles, featuring beautiful and unique hand-drawn cover illustrations. All Olive Editions are available for a limited time only.

The chilling and tragic tale of Victor Frankenstein and the tortured creature he brings to life, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, remains one of the most widely read Gothic novels of our time. Celebrating its 200th anniversary in 2018, Frankenstein is now available in a limited Olive Edition from HarperPerennial.
Olive Editions are exclusive small format editions of some of our bestselling and celebrated titles, featuring beautiful and unique hand-drawn cover illustrations. All Olive Editions are available for a limited time only.


One of Thomas Hardy's most famous novels is the story of an innocent young woman victimized by the double standards of her day.
Set in the magical Wessex landscape so familiar from Hardy's early work, Tess of the d'Urbervilles is unique among his great novels for the intense feeling that he lavished upon his heroine, Tess, a pure woman betrayed by love. Hardy poured all of his profound empathy for both humanity and the rhythms of natural life into this story of her beauty, goodness, and tragic fate. In so doing, he created a character who, like Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, has achieved classic stature.
The lives of the talented Aubrey children have long been clouded by their father's genius for instability, but his new job in the London suburbs promises, for a time at least, reprieve from scandal and the threat of ruin. Mrs. Aubrey, a former concert pianist, struggles to keep the family afloat, but then she is something of a high-strung eccentric herself, as is all too clear to her daughter Rose, through whose loving but sometimes cruel eyes events are seen. Still, living on the edge holds the promise of the unexpected, and the Aubreys, who encounter furious poltergeists, turn up hidden masterpieces, and come to the aid of a murderess, will find that they have adventure to spare.
In The Fountain Overflows, a 1957 best seller, Rebecca West transmuted her own volatile childhood into enduring art. This is an unvarnished but affectionate picture of an extraordinary family, in which a remarkable stylist and powerful intelligence surveys the elusive boundaries of childhood and adulthood, freedom and dependency, the ordinary and the occult.

Charles Dickens's most famous novel was also his own favorite, and the one that drew most on his own life story.
David Copperfield is the classic account of a boy growing up in a world that is by turns magical, fearful, and grimly realistic. In a book that is part fairy tale and part thinly veiled autobiography, Dickens transmutes his experiences into a brilliant series of comic and sentimental adventures in the spirit of the great eighteenth-century novelists he so much admired. Few readers can fail to be touched by David's fate, and fewer still to be delighted by his story. The cruel Murdstone, the feckless Micawber, the unctuous and sinister Uriah Heep, and David Copperfield himself, into whose portrait Dickens poured so much of his own early life, form an enduring part of our literary legacy.
The shortest of Charles Dickens's novels, Hard Times is also his most pointed and impassioned satire of social injustice.
Set in Coketown, a fictional industrial town in the north of England, Hard Times was born of its author's indignation at the soul-crushing conditions of the industrial age, and yet it vibrantly transcends the stock situations and polemical weaknesses typical of social protest fiction of the time. The indelible characters--Mr. Gradgrind, whose utilitarian educational philosophy emotionally cripples his own children; the hypocritical factory owner Josiah Bounderby; Stephen Blackpool, an honest worker wrongly accused of a crime; and Sissy Jupe, a circus performer whose father abandons her to what he hopes is a better life--all come alive in classic Dickensian fashion, and contribute to a satiric vision of society tempered equally by righteous anger and compassionate humanity.
For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

One of Charles Dickens's most fascinating novels, Great Expectations follows the orphan Pip as he leaves behind a childhood of misery and poverty after an anonymous benefactor offers him a chance at the life of a gentleman.
From young Pip's first terrifying encounter with the convict Magwitch in the gloom of a graveyard to the splendidly morbid set pieces in Miss Havisham's mansion to the magnificently realized boat chase down the Thames, the novel is filled with the transcendent excitement that Dickens could so abundantly provide. Written in 1860 at the height of his maturity, it also reveals the novelist's bittersweet understanding of the extent to which our deepest moral dilemmas are born of our own obsessions and illusions.
Of all Jane Austen's great and delightful novels, Persuasion is widely regarded as the most moving. It is the story of a second chance.
Anne Elliot, daughter of the snobbish, spendthrift Sir Walter Elliot, is a woman of quiet charm and deep feelings. When she was nineteen, she fell in love with-and was engaged to-a naval officer, the fearless and headstrong Captain Wentworth. But the young man had no fortune, and Anne allowed herself to be persuaded, against her profoundest instinct, to give him up.Now, at twenty-seven, and believing that she has lost her bloom, Anne is startled to learn that Captain Wentworth has returned to the neighborhood, a rich man and still unwed. Her never-diminished love is muffled by her pride. He seems cold and unforgiving. Even worse, he appears to be infatuated by the flighty and pretty Louisa Musgrove. What happens as Anne and Wentworth are thrown together in the social world of Bath-and as an eager new suitor appears for Anne-is touchingly and wittily told in a masterpiece that is also one of the most entrancing novels in the English language.