From one of the most influential and talented masters of the short story—and the writer of whom Virginia Woolf wrote, “I was jealous of her writing—the only writing I have ever been jealous of”—comes an exquisite paragon of the form. 
A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection

An afternoon at the Sheridan’s garden party will be perfect. Darling Laura is doing a marvelous job...

Horror was my familiar.
Published the same year as her first novel, Adam Bede, this overlooked work displays the gifts for which George Eliot would become famous—gritty realism, psychological insight, and idealistic moralizing. It is unique from all her other writing, however, in that it represents the only time she ever used a first-person narrator, and it is the only time she wrote about the supernatural.

The tale...

Middlemarch follows the lives of residents in a fictional 19th century English town grappling with love, ambition, and societal constraints. Dorothea Brooke, a passionate young woman, makes a misguided marriage to a scholar for intellectual fulfillment, only to find disappointment. Similarly, idealistic doctor Tertius Lydgate finds his career and marriage thwarted by small-town politics and his own choices. The novel explores themes of idealism,

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Miss Brill is a poignant short story by Katherine Mansfield that explores themes of isolation and self-delusion through the experiences of its titular character.The narrative unfolds on a beautiful autumn Sunday in a French public park, where Miss Brill, a middle-aged English woman, enjoys her weekly ritual of people-watching while wearing her cherished but shabby fur stole. This fur, which she affectionately treats as a companion, symbolizes her...

"The story's plot follows four characters rural lives in the fictional community of Hayslope---a rural, pastoral and close-knit community in 1799. The novel revolves around a love triangle between beautiful but thoughtless Hetty Sorrel, Captain Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who seduces her, Adam Bede, her unacknowledged lover, and Dinah Morris, Hetty's cousin, a fervent Methodist lay preacher."--Amazon.com George Eliot's first full-length...

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a mesmerizing and unsettling exploration of the female psyche and the stifling constraints of 19th-century society. The story is narrated by a woman suffering from what her husband and physicians diagnose as "nervous depression." She is confined to a room in her home and prescribed a treatment of complete rest. As the protagonist spends her days in isolation, she becomes increasingly obsessed...

Overview: This story of a proud rural beauty and the three men who court her is the novel that first made Thomas Hardy famous. Despite the violent ends of several of its major characters, Far from the Madding Crowd is the sunniest and least brooding of Hardy's great novels. The strong-minded Bathsheba Everdene-and the devoted shepherd, obsessed farmer, and dashing soldier who vie for her favor-move through a beautifully realized late nineteenth-century...

"Persuasion by Jane Austen. What does persuasion mean - a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most open to change. She lives at the time of the Napoleonic wars, a time of accident, adventure, the making of new fortunes and alliances. A woman of no importance, she maneuvers in her restricted circumstances as her long-time love...