Smith & Taylor Classics

When their father's death leaves them with no money and a dim future, the Madden sisters, Alice, Virginia, and Monica, must negotiate the gender roles and class constraints of Victorian London in the 1890s. Virginia and Alice have aged out of the possibility of marriage and seemingly the idea of love itself and find themselves with few prospects and little hope. Remaindered in the marriage equation, these "odd women" face a great deal of scrutiny, stigma, and social pressure-it's at this time that Rhoda Nunn, childhood friend to the Madden sisters, arrives in London to challenge accepted norms and mores around the role of women in society. Rhoda's strong feminist passion draws a sharp contrast to the middle-class respectability of the Madden sisters' upbring, as the sisters watch a new world emerge around them. Hailed as a prescient and boldly political novel of the early feminist movement, Gissing's The Odd Women captures all of the absurdity, brutality, and even comedy of Victorian attitudes around gender and class, and the brilliant women who dared to be odd and to conceive of their role in society beyond their value on the marriage market.

"No character was ever thrown into such strange relief as Gilliatt… here, indeed, the true position of man in the universe." -Robert Louis Stevenson The Toilers of the Sea tells the tale of Gilliatt, an outcast fisherman who must rescue one of the engines from a wrecked steamship. If successful, he will win the hand of the shipowner's beautiful daughter, Deruchette. He will brave the harsh rocks, the freezing waves, and even the grasp of a sea monster to prove his worth. Both a fairytale and richly detailed study of early nineteenth-century Guernsey, The Toilers of the Sea is the oft-forgotten novel that completes Hugo's famed trilogy with The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. It is a tribute to the drama of nature and the insignificance of man against it, to solitude in exile, and the light we choose to carry in the darkness.

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.

Mrs. Pauline Manford is a busy woman, as any upstanding New York society lady should be. Parties, dinners, charity luncheons, balls, and strict exercise and beauty regimes fill her daily schedule to an exhausting degree. Her secretary can hardly keep up. To manage a modern household is to hold the family together, staying on trend with all things helpful, but her daughter has horrible taste in married men, her ex-husband is unwell, and her son is struggling to forge a career for himself while his postpartum wife refuses to settle down from lavish partying. Pauline can't decide if she should bob her hair, redecorate, or get a face lift, and she surely doesn't have time to notice her current husband's wandering eye as anything other than harmless flirtations. When a rakish Italian actor bound for Hollywood and a scandal with the local wellness guru threaten to tear her perfectly constructed life apart, Pauline moves on to new spiritually medicinal treatments, and the Manfords must navigate the fraught tensions that bind them together. Hopefully a vacation from NYC's ruthless grind to their quiet country house will deter any further worries. Twilight Sleep (1927), named for the early anesthetic that predates epidural and induces memory loss, is Edith Wharton's oft-forgotten novel of modern motherhood and the pressures that lead women to reconstruct or completely escape their lives. Sharp and humorous, it feels as relevant today as it did in the 1920s.

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.

When Lockwood seeks relief from a lashing storm in the surly hospitality of Heathcliff, master of Wuthering Heights, a grand house on the Yorkshire moors, he can't imagine the tale that he will soon hear. It is a tale of passion and revenge involving Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, his childhood best friend and the love of his life who deals him a stunning betrayal. Reader and Lockwood both are held spellbound by the story of Heathcliff's quest for vengeance and his bitter acrimony which has devastating consequences for all. For generations, Emily Brontë's novel of suspense and operatic intensity has enraptured and moved readers to fall in love with Heathcliff's dark moods and brooding intensity. Salient to this day, this novel is a surprisingly modern exploration of race, gender, class, and the ways that love is frustrated and thwarted by bigotry and prejudice.