This is a guide-book to joy. It is for the use of the sad, the bored, the tired, anxious, disheartened and disappointed.

The niece of James Fenimore Cooper and a good friend and correspondent of Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson was a well known short story writer in the later part of the 19th century.

Washington Square by Henry James is the story of the gentle, dull Catherine Sloper who falls for the ambivalent Morris Townsend, who her father believes is a fortune hunter.

First published in 1886, The Bostonians is one of James' wittiest social satires.

Death consists in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing.

Thomas Hardy (1840 1928) was a naturalist and writer, whose fiction sits on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution and is filled with an imminent sense of nostalgia for the coming transformation of the British countryside.

A Princess of Mars is the first in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series. This science fiction planetary romance, packed full of dangerous feats and swordplay, is set on a dying Mars.

Liza of Lambeth (1897) narrates Liza's last four months alive.

According to the great horror writer H.P. Lovecraft The Ghost Pirates . . . is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils.

Published in 1901, M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud is an early last man science fiction novel.

You, my love, will be poor, so as to be more like all other women. In order for us to live together I shall work all day and so be your servant.

Pierre and Jean is a short realist novel by Guy de Maupassant.

Thomas Hardy's final novel Jude the Obscure explores notions of class, religion, marriage and modernization through its protagonist Jude Fawley, a working-class man who dreams of being a scholar.

One of Henry James' greatest novels, The Ambassadors is a dark comedy from 1903.

This first novel in Sax Rohmer's series, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu combined together previously written short stories into a single story about the dealings of this criminal mastermind.

Trilby (1894) is a gothic horror novel by George du Maurier and one of the most popular novels of its time, perhaps the second best selling novel of the Fin de siècle period after Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple became a huge seller in America from its first publication there in 1794, subsequently going through over two hundred editions.

The first novel by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton was published in 1848.

Born in Exile is an 1892 novel by George Robert Gissing, a prominent realist author of late-Victorian England who wrote twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903.

William Dean Howells' 1885 novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham tells the story of its protagonist's materialistic aspirations; his rise from rags to riches.