Narrator

Carolyn Seymour

Carolyn Seymour
  • The provincial Bennet family, home to five unmarried daughters, is turned upside down when a wealthy bachelor takes up a house nearby.

    Mr. Bingley enhances his instant popularity by hosting a ball and taking an interest in the eldest Bennet daughter, Jane. Meanwhile, Mr. Darcy, Bingley's even wealthier friend, makes himself equally unpopular by his aloof disdain of country manners. Yet he is drawn in spite of himself to the spirited and intelligent Elizabeth Bennet, who proves to be his match in both wit and pride. Their sparkling repartee is a splendid performance of civilized sparring infused with unacknowledged romantic tension.

    Pride and Prejudice delightfully captures the affectations and rivalries of class-conscious English families in an age when status and security for women hung entirely on matrimonial ambitions. Austen's characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.

    It is also the source of some of the most memorable characters ever written, from the fatuous Mr. Collins, whose proposal to Elizabeth is one of the finest comic passages in English literature, to the beloved heroine Elizabeth, whom the author herself deemed "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print."

  • The sole novel of Emily Brontë, who died a year after its publication at the age of thirty, Wuthering Heights is one of the most original classics in the canon of English literature. Set amid the wild and stormy Yorkshire moors, it is the tale of childhood playmates who grow into soul mates, and whose tempestuous natures and obsessive love eventually destroy them and those around them.

    High on a windy hill, the old gothic manor of Wuthering Heights is the ancestral home of the lordly Earnshaw family. When kind Mr. Earnshaw adopts Heathcliff, a wild child from the slums, he unwittingly sets in motion a cycle of love and revenge that will possess his family for a generation. Heathcliff is despised and abused by Earnshaw’s son and heir, Hindley, who views him as a rival. But Heathcliff’s tempestuous nature finds its match in Earnshaw’s daughter, Catherine, and the two become inseparable.

    When Hindley becomes master of the estate, he forces Heathcliff to work as a degraded hired hand. Cathy, now divided from Heathcliff by social status, decides to marry the civilized Edgar Linton in hopes of gaining leverage to protect Heathcliff from her brother. To her despair, Heathcliff disappears; but he returns a few years later, now a wealthy gentleman, intent on using his new power to ruin Hindley, Edgar, and anyone who dared to drive a wedge between him and Cathy.

    Fraught with psychological tension and supernatural atmosphere, Wuthering Heights is a haunting tale of the exalted heights and destructive depths of human passion.

  • When Lynn Barber was sixteen, a stranger in a maroon sports car pulled up beside her as she was on her way home from school and offered her a ride. It was the beginning of a long journey from innocence to a precocious experience—an affair with an older man that would change her life. Barber's seducer left her with a taste for luxury hotels, posh restaurants and trips abroad—expensive habits that she managed to support in later life as a successful London journalist whose barbed interviews both terrorized and fascinated her smart-set subjects.

    A poignant, shockingly candid account of the stages in a literary life—from promiscuity at Oxford to a stint at Penthouse to a complex marriage that endured—An Education is a classic of English memoir.