Smith & Taylor Classics

Lucy Graham, radiantly beautiful, born to poverty, and Sir Michael Audley, aging aristocratic widower and fabulously wealthy, are married soon after first glance. Life is peaceful at old Audley Court until the arrival of Robert Audley– Sir Michael's nephew– and his friend George Talboys, who is home again after making his fortune in Australia. When George mysteriously disappears, Robert takes it upon himself to find him again. Developing a detective's eye, following disturbing clue after clue, Robert becomes convinced his alluring Aunt Lucy isn't as innocent, or possibly as sane, as she seems. Lady Audley's Secret first appeared in Robin Goodfellow magazine in 1861, establishing it as a "sensational" novel to rival Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860). A cunningly plotted mystery novel as sensual as a Pre-Raphaelite portrait, Lady Audley's Secret probes mid-Victorian anxieties about the rapid rise of consumerism with the invention of one of literature's great villainesses who goes to great lengths to secure her greatest desires.

A nameless female writer has come to Dunnet Landing, a small town on the coast of Maine, for the summer in order to finish her manuscript. Once there, she finds herself absorbed in the rhythms of daily life, which come at a much-altered pace than the city she's left behind. Her observations of the residents of Dunnet Landing-their loves, their fights, their occupation with sky and sea and land, their tall tales, and their quiet secrets-comprise The Country of the Pointed Firs. It is a novel made seemingly from the very fabric of community. Jewett's beautiful, delicate descriptions and her wonderfully natural dialogue bring the whole town and its many inhabitants to life. Once described by Henry James as Jewett's "beautiful little quantum of achievement," The Country of the Pointed Firs is a stunning testament to the power of place and memory.

Set amid the rapidly changing social, spiritual, and moral landscape of the industrial revolution, North and South is a forceful, brilliant, and romantic novel about freedom and the cost of profit. When Margaret Hale, a minister's daughter, relocates with her family to Milton in the north of England she witnesses firsthand the brutal working conditions in Milton's factories and mills. Her liberal education has given her strong convictions, but little common sense, and her pity finds a mostly unsympathetic ear among the gruff mill workers and their families. Magaret is most vexed by a local industrialist and mill-owner, John Thornton, whom she considers contemptuous and bull-headed. But through her clashes with Thornton and her growing affinity for the workers and their plight for survival, Margaret comes to see the world as a much more complicated place, and that her earlier pity was not charity but a kind of arrogance. Thunderously philosophical and compulsively readable, North and South is a vivid portrayal of not only unthinking conformity or selfish individualism, but the power of vulnerability and change.

"My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown." In his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Edgar Allan Poe carries his knack for the mysterious and macabre, spilt blood and cryptic messages onto the South Seas. Aboard a whaling ship, stowaway Pym will endure starvation, cannibalism, whirlpools, mad dogs and premature burials on a journey toward the frozen expanse of Antarctica. Published the year full emancipation was legalized by the UK's Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, Arthur Gordon Pym captures the relentless anxiety and violence of pre-Civil War American expansion. Allegorical, tragic, and based on real events, this adventure story went on to inspire many authors from Herman Melville and Jules Verne, to H.G. Wells and Vladmir Nabokov. This edition also includes accompanying selected letters, essays, and criticism from Poe himself.

Bewitching ghost stories from seminal short story writer Vernon Lee. "My ghosts are what you call spurious ghosts, of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, among others, my own…" Shipwrecked before a remote Italian coastal village, a young girl discovers the ability to command love and incite madness; a Polish historian is drawn to the enigmatic allure of a medieval Duchess with a deadly past; a painter, hired to capture the likeness of a reclusive couple, slowly uncovers a mysterious love affair; and a man with a voice that is as deadly as it is beautiful eats away at the health of those who hear him sing, troubling a composer years later. Once described by Henry James as being "as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent," Vernon Lee's ghost stories haunt as much as they reveal an obsession with art, architecture, and deadly, queer desires. Even the smallest vibration from the past signals danger for the characters in Hauntings: from the emanations of old houses and old books to the discovery of old portraits, objects come alive and worm into the minds of the living.