Charlotte Bronte: Ultimate Collection (Fiction Classics Book 4)

Set in England at the turn of the century, Howards End immortalizes the pursuits, missteps, encounters, and conflicts of three families—the Wilcoxes, the Schlegels, and the Basts. Racism as an erasing force, a force that renders human beings invisible to society and to themselves, is at the center of this powerful bildungsroman by Ralph Ellison.

The bonds of the four March sisters and their mother are at the heart of this classic novel, which unfolds the courses of their lives and imaginations across Civil War-era Massachusetts. Frederick Douglass tells his life story in this work, from the years he was enslaved in the pre-Civil War South to his escape, his freedom, his work, and his dedication to the abolitionist movement. The story, non-linear as it is, emerges line by line and note by note, however differently it's read each time.

At the heart of this novel, which is told in simple, sincere prose, is the spiritual journey of a man named Siddhartha who searches for self-discovery throughout the years of his life. Gilded Age New York plays host to this lauded work, a novel published in that concerns itself with family strife and social scandal amid looming nuptials. Tracing the tangle of a new job in New York City and the simultaneous onrush of clinical depression, The Bell Jar brings the interior world of central character Esther Greenwood into stunning relief.

The Brothers Karamazov unfurls drama, philosophy, and morality against a vision of 19th-century Russia. The Complete Works is a must read at any stage of life, not just for a semester of English It presents the lives of the Wingfield family—Amanda, Tom, and Laura—and the disturbance they feel when a gentleman caller enters their lives. While Roman poet Ovid originally wrote the Metamorphoses in Latin, readers now widely enjoy the translations, which offer nuanced lyrics on hundreds of classical myths.

An enchanted portrait and a life of debauchery are at the core of this lavish literary horror by Oscar Wilde. I turned to Elizabeth Gaskell's Life, but I could not recognise the sanitised Charlotte she conjured up. Gaskell befriended Charlotte when the novelist was 34 and already a star.

Contemporary critics had been appalled by Jane Eyre's "coarseness", but the public was thrilled and Charlotte was a celebrity. Gaskell waspishly described her first sight of Charlotte in a letter: Gaskell described her encounters with Charlotte to friends in long, gossipy, gawking letters. Why may I not be well like other people? She wanted to rescue her friend from the accusations of "coarseness" and she did not have to wait long: Charlotte died in , nine months after her wedding to Arthur Bell Nicholls.

Gaskell portrays Charlotte as Victim Supreme. Charlotte, Anne and Emily were "shy of meeting even familiar faces". They "never faced their kind voluntarily". Under Gaskell's pen, they become the three witches of Haworth and she hurls on the Gothic gloom, ravaging the moorlands and the town for appropriate props. She has a particular fondness for the graveyard outside their front door: She could never accept they were, quite simply, talented.

There had to be a magical mystery at work on those moors Gaskell carefully fillets the letters to match her agenda.

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Any hint of Charlotte as a sexual being is tossed on to the historical furnace. Charlotte's correspondence with the married love of her life, Monsieur Heger of Brussels, is ignored, as is her thwarted romance with George Smith. Gaskell could hardly leave out Charlotte's marriage to Arthur Nicholls - but no doubt she would have liked to. Gaskell wrote the Life as a tragedy, not a triumph.

She was not a wallflower in mourning. She always wanted to be famous; she pined to be "forever known". Aged 20, she wrote boldly to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey, asking for his opinion of her talents. The daydreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind. Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and it ought not to be. She concluded the correspondence "made her put aside, for a time, all idea of literary enterprise". Charlotte continued in her position as a schoolteacher, which she had already held for a year. But she hated her profession and heartily despised the aggravating brats she was forced to teach.

As the children at Roe Head School did their lessons, she wrote in her journal: I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me: Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while the glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow and declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again?

Just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited. Charlotte didn't want to kiss those children; she wanted to vomit on them.

Charlotte did not only feel passionate hatred for small children; she felt passionate love for men. Unlike the female eunuch created by Gaskell, she was obsessed with her sensuality. She wrote to a friend: Gaskell dismisses it as "traces of despondency". In Brussels, studying to become a governess at Heger's school, the virgin became ever more lustful.

She wrote obsessive letters to him, begging for his attention. If I sleep I have tortured dreams in which I see you always severe, always gloomy and annoyed with me. I do not seek to justify myself, I submit to every kind of reproach - all that I know - is that I cannot - that I will not resign myself to losing the friendship of my master completely - I would rather undergo the greatest physical sufferings.

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If my master withdraws his friendship entirely from me I will be completely without hope I cling on to preserving that little interest - I cling on to it as I cling on to life. When Gaskell heard of these letters she panicked.