Μυθιστόρημα

What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages - oh, here is Jacob's room.'

Who is Jacob Flanders? Virginia Woolf's third novel, published in 1922 alongside James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, follows this elusive title character from a sunlit childhood on the Cornwall coast to adventures in Cambridge, London, and Athens. Women fall in love with Jacob; young men desire his company and conversation. But Woolf keeps her scornful, charming protagonist at a distance, enveloping Jacob in mystery as he enters adulthood and the Great War
thunders across Europe. A daring work that reimagines every element of the traditional novel, Jacob's Room tells a new story for a new century.

In 1922, Lytton Strachey pronounced Jacob's Room 'a most wonderful achievement-more like poetry, it seems to me, than anything else, and as such I prophesy immortal.' One hundred years after its publication, Woolf's first full-length work of experimental fiction pulls us into the inexhaustible mysteries of intimacy and mortality.

"Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt!"Throughout the hardships of her childhood - spent with a severe aunt and abusive cousin, and later at the austere Lowood charity school - Jane Eyre clings to a sense of self-worth, despite of her treatment from those close to her. At the age of eighteen, sick of her narrow existence, she seeks work as a governess. The monotony of Jane's new life at Thornfield Hall is broken up by the arrival of her peculiar and changeful employer, Mr Rochester. Routine at the mansion is further disrupted bymysterious incidents that draw the pair closer together but which, once explained, threaten Jane's happiness and integrity. A flagship of Victorian fiction, Jane Eyre draws the reader in by the vigour of Jane's voice and the novel's forceful depiction of childhood injustice, of the restraints placed upon women, and the complexities of both faith and passion. The emotional charge of Jane's story is as strong today as it was more than 150 years ago, as she seeks dignity and freedom on her own terms. In this new edition, Juliette Atkinson explores the power of narrative voice and looks at the striking physicality of the novel, which is both shocking and romantic.

As close to an autobiography as London ever wrote, this brutally frank memoir of a lifelong struggle with alcohol also offers insights into the author's life as an adventurer and popular writer.

Joseph Andrews refuses Lady Booby's advances, she discharges him, and Joseph — in the company of his old tutor, Parson Adams (one of the great comic figures of literature) — sets out from London to visit his sweetheart, Fanny. Along the way, the two travelers meet with a series of adventures — some hilarious, some heartstopping — in which through their own innocence and honesty they expose the hypocrisy and affectation of others. Joseph Andrews started out as a parody of Richardson's Pamela, but soon left that purpose behind and now is regarded as the first English realistic novel.

First published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and a turning point in French literature. Told in the first person by Celine's fictional alter ego Bardamu, the novel is loosely based on the author's own experiences during the First World War, in French colonial Africa, in the USA and, later, as a young doctor in a working-class suburb in Paris. Celine's disgust with human folly, malice, greed and the chaotic state in which man has left society lies behind the bitterness that distinguishes his idiosyncratic, colloquial and visionary writing and gives it its force.

Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as 'useful [corrective] to the romantic conception of war', R.C. Sherriff's Journey's End is an unflinching vision of life in the trenches towards the end of the First World War, published in Penguin Classics. Set in the First World War, Journey's End concerns a group of British officers on the front line and opens in a dugout in the trenches in France. Raleigh, a new eighteen-year-old officer fresh out of English public school, joins the besieged company of his friend and cricketing hero Stanhope, and finds him dramatically changed. Laurence Olivier starred as Stanhope in the first performance of Journey's End in 1928; the play was an instant stage success and remains a remarkable anti-war classic. R.C. Sherriff (1896-1975) joined the army shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, serving as a captain in the East Surrey regiment. After the war, an interest in amateur theatricals led him to try his hand at writing. Following rejection by many theatre managements, Journey's End was given a single performance by the Incorporated Stage Society, in which Lawrence Olivier took the lead role. The play's enormous success enabled Sherriff to become a full-time writer, with plays such as Badger's Green (1930), St Helena (1935), and The Long Sunset (1955); though he is also remembered as a screenplay writer, for films such as The Invisible Man (1933), Goodbye Mr Chips (1933) and The Dam Busters (1955). If you enjoyed Journey's End, you might like Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That, available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Its unrelenting tension, and its regard for human decency in a vast world of human waste, are impressive and, even now, moving'Clive Barnes

Introduction and Notes by Norman Vance, Professor of English, University of Sussex. Jude Fawley is a rural stone mason with intellectual aspirations. Frustrated by poverty and the indifference of the academic institutions at the University of Christminster, his only chance of fulfilment seems to lie in his relationship with his unconventional cousin, Sue Bridehead. But life as social outcasts proves undermining, and when tragedy occurs, Sue has no resilience and Jude is left in despair. Hardy's portrait of Jude, the idealist and dreamer who is a prisoner of his own physical nature, is one of the most haunting and desperate of his creations. Jude the Obscure is a dark yet compassionate account of the insurmountable frustrations of human existence which reflect Hardy's yearning for the spiritual values of the past and his despair at their decline.

Powerful and controversial from its 1895 publication to the present, "Jude the Obscure" scandalized Victorian critics, who condemned it as decadent, indecent, and degenerate. Between its frank portrayals of sexuality and its indictments of marriage, religion, and England's class system, the novel offended a broad swath of readers. Its heated reception led the embittered author to renounce fiction, turning his considerable talents ever afterward to writing poetry. Hardy's last novel depicts a changing world, where a poor stonemason can aspire to a university education and a higher place in society -- but where in reality such dreams remain unattainable. Thwarted at every turn, Jude Hawley abandons his hopes, is trapped into an unwise marriage, and pursues a doomed relationship with his free-spirited cousin, Sue Bridehead. The lovers find themselves equally incapable of living within the conventions of their era and of transcending its legal and moral strictures. Hailed by modern critics as a pioneering work of feminism and socialist thought, Hardy's tragic parable continues to resonate with readers.