Secondhand Literary Classics Bargain Book Box SP2831

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2831

Five Henry James titles and five Edith Wharton novels anchor a box of exceptional literary range, spanning the tradition from Hawthorne and George Eliot through Fitzgerald, Mansfield, and Doris Lessing. With Charlotte Brontë in two volumes, Nancy Mitford twice over, and Forster, Austen, and Wilde rounding out an already distinguished lineup, this is a box for readers who take their literary fiction seriously — twenty-three titles from the heart of the English-language canon.

1. Diana of the Crossways — George Meredith — Meredith's vivid novel of a brilliant, unconventional woman navigating social pressure and romantic entanglement in Victorian England; a Virago Modern Classics rediscovery of a writer who once rivalled Hardy and Eliot in reputation.
2. The Buccaneers — Edith Wharton — Wharton's unfinished final novel; a sharp and affectionate story of American heiresses taking London and the English aristocracy by storm, with all her social intelligence and wit intact.
3. The House of Mirth — Edith Wharton — Wharton's devastating portrait of Lily Bart's fall from grace through New York society; one of the great American novels, relentless in its analysis of money, beauty, and social cruelty.
4. The Reef — Edith Wharton — A psychologically intricate novel of love, deception, and the moral complexities of desire; Wharton working with the formal precision of a chamber drama.
5. The Mother's Recompense — Edith Wharton — A quietly devastating story of a mother whose past becomes entangled with her daughter's present; late Wharton at her most morally searching and emotionally precise.
6. The Custom of the Country — Edith Wharton — The most ruthless of Wharton's social comedies, following the unstoppable Undine Spragg as she cuts through American and European society without sentiment or regret.
7. The Professor — Charlotte Brontë — Charlotte Brontë's first novel, the quietest and most restrained of her books; a story of hard work and delayed reward told with characteristic psychological acuity.
8. Love in a Cold Climate — Nancy Mitford — Mitford's sparkling account of the Radlett family's world and the dazzling, enigmatic Lady Montdore; one of the finest comic novels of the postwar English social scene.
9. Collected Short Stories — E.M. Forster — Forster's shorter fiction, ranging from the whimsical to the visionary; essential for understanding the full range of his literary imagination beyond the great novels.
10. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald — Fitzgerald's perfect novel of jazz-age ambition and self-destruction; one of the undisputed masterworks of 20th-century American literature.
11. The Garden Party and Other Stories — Katherine Mansfield — Mansfield's finest collection, gathering the stories that secured her reputation as one of modernism's most gifted and precise short fiction writers.
12. Five — Doris Lessing — An omnibus gathering five of Lessing's early novels in a single volume; essential reading for the range and ambition of one of the 20th century's most important novelists.
13. The Blessing — Nancy Mitford — Mitford's most perfectly formed novel; a comedy of Franco-British manners in which a marriage falls apart with exquisite style and very little sentiment.
14. Sanditon — Jane Austen and Another Lady — Austen's unfinished final novel brought to completion; a fresh and spirited portrait of a new seaside resort and the social energies of the Regency era.
15. Scenes of Clerical Life — George Eliot — Eliot's first published fiction, three novellas of provincial English life; the work that announced one of literature's greatest minds with characteristic moral seriousness.
16. The Europeans — Henry James — An early James novel of cultural contrast, as two European cousins visit their American relatives in New England; elegant, witty, and beautifully measured.
17. The Scarlet Letter — Nathaniel Hawthorne — Hawthorne's classic of sin, guilt, and redemption set in Puritan New England; the foundational novel of the American literary tradition.
18. Shirley — Charlotte Brontë — Charlotte Brontë's panoramic second novel, set against the Luddite unrest of the Napoleonic wars; a story of two very different women and the world that constrains them.
19. Washington Square — Henry James — A spare and devastating study of a plain, wealthy woman exploited by a handsome suitor and controlled by a brilliant father; among James's most readable and emotionally direct works.
20. The Ambassadors — Henry James — Generally considered James's own favourite of his novels; Lambert Strether is sent to Paris to bring home a young American and finds himself seduced by everything he was sent to resist.
21. Sayings of Oscar Wilde — Oscar Wilde — A collection of Wilde's most brilliant and memorable remarks; proof that no one in the English literary tradition deployed wit more precisely or more devastatingly.
22. The Spoils of Poynton — Henry James — James's intense short novel of aesthetics and possession, in which a mother's beautiful house becomes the battlefield for a war of wills; tightly wrought and extraordinarily compressed.
23. Roderick Hudson — Henry James — James's first mature novel, following a gifted American sculptor in Rome whose talent is consumed by passion and self-destruction; the earliest statement of the international theme that would define his career.