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Descubre un mundo infinito de historias

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Jane Austen

Inspired by Les Liaisons Dangereuses and written in a similar epistolary form, Lady Susan was one of Austen's earliest finished works. In it she reveals all the caustic wit and brilliant social satire of her later novels. The victim of a vicious scandal, impoverished Lady Susan is obliged to take up residence with her brother-in-law and his family. Refusing to resign herself to the role of placid house guest, she engineers to baffle her hosts, seducing her sister-in-law's brother in the process by means of her impeccable gentility and some well-judged flirtation. Yet before her victory is complete, she must first contend with the untimely reappearance of a former lover.

Hesperus Press Ltd.

Hesperus Classics

Lady Susan

Charles Dickens

Best known for enduring classics such as Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens also wrote a number of short stories and novellas, often neglected today. A House to Let is one such story, originally published in Household Words and ingeniously written in alternating chapters by Dickens himself and his friends Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter. Advised by her doctor to have a change of scene, the elderly Sophonisba takes up lodgings in London. Immediately intrigued by the vacant 'house to let' opposite, she charges her two warring servants, Trottle and Jarber, to unearth the secret behind its seeming desertedness. Rivals to the end, they each seek to outdo the other to satisfy their mistress' curiosity, but it is only after repeated false starts - and by way of elaborate tales of lost men at sea, circus performers, and forged death certificates - that they happen upon the truth.

House to Let

Emile Zola

In his three short stories, 'For a Night of Love', 'Nantas', and 'Fasting', Emile Zola presents characters in search of fulfilment - romantic, religious, and financial. Read together, For a Night of Love is an extraordinary depiction of sexual mores. When the apparently angelic Thérèse commits murder, she offers sexual favours to a petty clerk if he will dispose of the body; the pregnant Flavie manipulates a neighbour's interest in her dowry to arrange a shotgun wedding; churchgoing women find their hunger for Christianity unsatisfied by a vapid priest - these beautiful and poignant stories are united by the powerful themes of deception and dissatisfaction.

For a Night of Love

Libby Purves

Henry James

Henry James's 1898 novella In the Cage (written in the same year as the more well-known The Turn of the Screw) is a sly, slight, vaguely sentimental work but one that acts as a fine introduction to this most convoluted of writers. Exact ("exacting" yet with a pointillist's precision) is the word most often used to describe James's prose but very often the modern reader will find his hesitant, pedantic, clause-heavy sentences difficult to follow, overlong and tortuously complex. But the key to reading and enjoying James is in succumbing to those very sentences, allowing his perfect ear and fine metre to establish its own rhythm, letting it guide one's response to his beautiful, matchless use of language. In the Cage tells the story of a young women, the "betrothed of Mr Mudge", who works at a post-office counter sending telegrams mostly from the "idle rich" to their fellows to arrange their meetings, parties and other affairs. Concerned, as ever, with the plight of the not so well-to-do--and particularly the role and circumstances of women--James finely delineates our heroine's increasing preoccupation with Captain Everard for whom she sends a considerable number of messages and about whom she has increasingly warm thoughts: "people of her sort... didn't count as infidelity, counted only as something else: she might have been curious, since it came to that, to see exactly as what".

In the Cage

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