Wordsworth Library Collection – serie

Wilde’s works are suffused with his aestheticism, brilliant craftsmanship, legendary wit and, ultimately, his tragic muse. He wrote tender fairy stories for children employing all his grace, artistry and wit, of which the best-known is The Happy Prince. Counterpoints to this were his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which shocked and outraged many readers of his day, and his stories for adults which exhibited his fascination with the relations between serene art and decadent life. Wilde took London by storm with his plays, particularly his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest.His essays – in particular De Profundis – and his Ballad of Reading Gaol, both written after his release from prison, strikingly break the bounds of his usual expressive range. His other essays and poems are all included in this comprehensive collection of the works of one of the most exciting writers of the late nineteenth century.Our Library Collection hardback series has been completely redesigned, for launch in November 2024. The books are now finished in black, soft-touch linen, cloth bound with metallic gold and matt coloured foil blocking. They come complete with co-ordinated head and tail bands, a silk ribbon marker and coloured spray edges. The pages are sewn, and the end papers are in two colours featuring an exclusive design by Holly Dunn.

It was in 1887 that the ascetic, gaunt and enigmatic detective, Sherlock Holmes, made his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet. From 1891, beginning with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the legendary and pioneering Strand Magazine began serialising Arthur Conan Doyle’s matchless tales of detection, featuring the incomparable sleuth patiently assisted by his doggedly loyal and lovably pedantic friend and companion, Dr Watson.The stories in this edition are illustrated by the remarkable Sydney Paget from whom our images of Sherlock Holmes and his world derive and who first equipped Holmes with his famous deerstalker hat.The literary cult of Sherlock Holmes shows no sign of fading with time as each new generation comes to love and revere the penetrating mind and ruthless logic which were the undoing of so many Victorian master criminals.Our Library Collection hardback series has been completely redesigned, for launch in November 2024. The books are now finished in black, soft-touch linen, cloth bound with metallic gold and matt coloured foil blocking. They come complete with co-ordinated head and tail bands, a silk ribbon marker and coloured spray edges. The pages are sewn, and the end papers are in two colours featuring an exclusive design by Holly Dunn.

Jane Austen is without question, one of England’s most enduring and skilled novelists. With her wit, social precision, and unerring ability to create some of literature’s most charismatic and believable heroines, she mesmerises her readers as much today as when her novels were first published.Whether it is her sharp, ironic gaze at the Gothic genre invoked by the adventures of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey; the diffident and much put-upon Fanny Price struggling to cope with her emotions in Mansfield Park; her delightfully paced comedy of manners and the machinations of the sisters Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility; the quiet strength of Anne Elliot in Persuasion succeeding in a world designed to subjugate her very existence; Emma – ‘a heroine whom no one but myself will like’ teased Austen – yet another irresistible character on fire with imagination and foresight; or the efforts of Mrs Bennet in trying to find a good match for each of her five daughters in Pride and Prejudice.Our Library Collection hardback series has been completely redesigned, for launch in November 2024. The books are now finished in black, soft-touch linen, cloth bound with metallic gold and matt coloured foil blocking. They come complete with co-ordinated head and tail bands, a silk ribbon marker and coloured spray edges. The pages are sewn, and the end papers are in two colours featuring an exclusive design by Holly Dunn. Northanger Abbey; the diffident and much put-upon Fanny Price struggling to cope with her emotions in Mansfield Park; her delightfully paced comedy of manners and the machinations of the sisters Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility; the quiet strength of Anne Elliot in Persuasion succeeding in a world designed to subjugate her very existence; Emma – ‘a heroine whom no one but myself will like’ teased Austen – yet another irresistible character on fire with imagination and foresight; or the efforts of Mrs Bennet in trying to find a good match for each of her five daughters in Pride and Prejudice.Jane Austen is as sure-footed in her steps through society’s whirlpools of convention and prosaic mores as she is in her sometimes restrained but ever precise and enduring prose.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is acknowledged as the greatest dramatist of all time. He excels in plot, poetry and wit, and his talent encompasses the great tragedies of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Macbeth as well as the moving history plays and the comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew and As You Like It with their magical combination of humour, ribaldry and tenderness.This volume is a reprint of the Shakespeare Head Press edition, and it presents all the plays in chronological order in which they were written. It also includes Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as well as his longer poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.Our Library Collection hardback series has been completely redesigned, for launch in November 2024. The books are now finished in black, soft-touch linen, cloth bound with metallic gold and matt coloured foil blocking. They come complete with co-ordinated head and tail bands, a silk ribbon marker and coloured spray edges. The pages are sewn, and the end papers are in two colours featuring an exclusive design by Holly Dunn.