When Robert Browning first met the ailing Elizabeth Barrett in 1845 it must have seemed to him like something from a gothic novel.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's second novel starring the great detective Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four weaves together a complex plot involving stolen treasure, a secret pact between guards and prisoners, and the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

Inspiring countless business, political and military leaders (Napoleon, Mao Zedong and General MacArthur among them), The Art of War is a Chinese military treatise by Sun Tzu from the 6th century BC.

The School for Husbands (L'École des maris) is a work by Molière (the stage name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), a French playwright who is often considered to be one of Western literature's great masters of comedy.

The Brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859), were born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, in the German state of Hesse.

Nicholas Nickleby is left responsible for his mother and sister when his father dies.

Helen Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life, tells of her early life and of her experiences with Annie Sullivan, her teacher and companion.

British writer John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps is the first of five adventure novels to star Richard Hannay, a man with a remarkable knack for getting out of sticky situations, and indeed getting into them in the first place.

In this autobiography, also titled The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Mohandas K. Gandhi recounts his life from childhood up until 1921, noting that my life from this point onward has been so public.

J M Barrie's most famous character, Peter Pan, originated in a whimsical story from his book The Little White Bird.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol under financial duress, but it became one of his most popular and enduring stories.

H. G. Wells' comic 1910 novel, The History of Mr. Polly, stars Alfred Polly, a timid man who is more successful at daydreaming than working in the local draper's shops.

One of H. G. Wells' first ventures outside of the science fiction realm, the novel Love and Mr. Lewisham was published in the year 1900.

Student! Your life is your own. You have only yourself to thank for what you are, have been and will be.

In the third book in L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series, Anne of the Island, our protagonist leaves her teaching work in Avonlea in order to study for her B.A. at Redmond College.

James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is the fictional account of the life of a young American man in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Sara Crewe's young but doting father sends her to a London boarding school when she is seven.

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.

Lady Audley's Secret was one of the first and most successful sensation novels of the late 19th century. A young gentleman of leisure, Robert Audley, is spurred into action when his friend Geroge Talboys goes missing from Audley Court.

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.