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.

Edgar Poe was born the son of itinerant actors on January 19th, 1809 in Boston, Massachusets. Abandoned by his father and the later death of his mother, he was taken into the foster care of John Allan, a Virginia tobacco farmer. Now styled as Edgar Allan Poe, he distinguished himself at the University of Virginia but was equally adept at collecting debts from his assiduous gambling. His stepfather’s disapproval shattered their fragile relationship and Poe left home to seek his fortune.In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia but despite his prolific activities – journalism, poetry, lecturing, short stories, publishing, criticism and experimentation with fictional genres, including the detective novel which he virtually invented with the publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) – he received scant recognition for his efforts until the publication of The Raven in 1845. The poem’s instant popularity gave him a new visibility in literary circles, but his personal situation remained desperate: poverty, illness, drink, and the physical decline and ultimate death of Virginia in 1847 led to his untimely and premature decline. In 1849 he was found sick, injured and semi-conscious in a Baltimore tavern. Taken to hospital, he lingered on for four days, but never recovered and on October 7th Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of 40.He was one of the most original writers in the history of American letters – a genius who, thanks to his dire reputation, was tragically misunderstood during his lifetime. It was not until Baudelaire enthusiastically translated his work that he found a wider audience in Europe, and became not only an enormous influence on modern French literature but also on the acclaimed work of writers such as Dostoevsky, Conan Doyle and Jules Verne.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.