Vivian R. Thornbury – författare

Kate Chopin's The Awakening was condemned as morbid and vulgar, quietly pulled from the shelves, and left unread for fifty years - and is now recognized as a landmark of American literature. Summering on Grand Isle, a young Creole wife learns to swim and begins to want a fuller life than Louisiana in 1899 will allow her, with consequences she cannot take back. Gathered here with a selection of Chopin's finest short stories, this edition presents the complete and unabridged texts, newly typeset and illustrated with 36 full-page color plates.

Before he created Charlie Chan, Earl Derr Biggers wrote this neat little mystery of love and murder by letter. A young American in London courts a girl through the personal column of a newspaper, and - to keep her interested - invents a murder in the house next door. Then the murder actually happens. Ingenious and charming, with a trick worthy of the master he would become, this edition presents the complete and unabridged novella, newly typeset and illustrated with 30 full-page color plates.

Virginia Woolf's first novel, seven years and two breakdowns in the making, sends the sheltered, half-educated Rachel Vinrace across the ocean on her father's ship to South America - and into the company of the English abroad, among them a young man who dreams of writing a novel about silence. Beneath its conventional surface stir all the questions Woolf's later work would make famous. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 50 full-page color plates, Church's tropics among them.

James Oliver Curwood, paid by the Canadian government to roam the far north and later a convert who gave up hunting altogether, wrote this tender wilderness tale out of love for the country and its creatures. Neewa the bear cub and Miki the pup, orphaned in the same week, take up together in the great northern forest - while a man and a woman flee the Mounted Police across the very same wild. This edition presents Curwood's complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 34 full-page color plates.

William Dean Howells - editor of The Atlantic and the most powerful literary broker in America - turns his realist's eye on the delicate cruelties of patronage. A Vermont girl of no family is taken up by a wealthy woman as a companion and carried off to Italy, where the arrangement, and everyone's precise notion of what she is owed, quietly comes apart. Her refusal to be grateful on command is the whole of the book. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 30 full-page color plates.

Maria Edgeworth helped manage her father's estate in County Longford, and no one wrote more sharply about absentee landlordism from the inside. Lord and Lady Clonbrony squander in London the rents of an Irish estate they have not visited in years, while their agent bleeds it dry - until their son crosses over incognito to see the truth for himself. A witty, humane, and unsparing comedy of manners and money, this edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 50 full-page color plates, Wilkie's Rent Day among them.

Thomas Hardy called The Woodlanders the novel of his he loved best as a story. In a remote Dorset hamlet where everyone lives by the trees, a timber merchant educates his daughter above her station and marries her to a doctor who despises the place - while a man who plants saplings and holds his tongue loves her in silence. Around them move a fine lady from the great house and a barber hunting a woman's hair for profit. Here the woods are not scenery but the very economy of life. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 50 full-page color plates.