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Jane Austen was fascinated by this question, subjecting it to her forensic eye and wonderfully ironic wit again and again.

Selected from the novels Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion by Jane Austen.

VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS.

(Hardback)

The distinctive combination of manic comedy, bitter satire and fierce melodrama separates this novel from its author's other works. Published in 1844 after Dickens returned from America, the action moves between Britain and United States in ways which highligh the failing of both societies.

(Paperback)

Lev Ganin is a young officer sharing a boarding house in Berlin with a host of Russian emigres. Alone in his room, he dreams of his first love, Mary. Awash with memories of youth and idyllic scenes of pre-Revolution Russia, Ganin becomes convinced that Mary is in fact the wife of a fellow-boarder, due to arrive at this very house soon.

(Hardback)

A romantic story with descriptions of working people and their lives, as the author encountered them in northern mills. Despite this grim setting, the book has the power to involve the reader in the lives of Elizabeth Gaskell's characters.

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Mary Barton rejects her childhood friend Jem's affections in the hope of marrying Henry, mill-owner's charming son, and escaping from the hard and bitter life that is the fate of the mill workers. But when Henry is shot dead in the street Jem becomes the prime suspect and Mary finds her loyalties tested to the limit.

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Roy Edwards's vibrant translation conveys the satirical and innovative style of Multatuli's autobiographical polemic. In his introduction, R. P. Meijer discusses the author's tempestuous life and career, the controversy the novel aroused and its unusual narrative structure.

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In the Angler's Rest, drinking hot scotch and lemon, sits one of Wodehouse's greatest raconteurs. Mr Mulliner, his vivid imagination lubricated by Miss Postlethwaite the barmaid, has fabulous stories to tell of the behaviour of his far-flung family.

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In a satanic bargain, Melmoth exchanges his soul for immortality. This book tells the story of his tortured wanderings through the centuries.

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Offers an account of the wanderings of a young man who leaves home after a row with his father, and who eventually finds love with the girl of his dreams.

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Rediscovered satirical work by one of the greatest satirists of the turn of the last century. Since mothers-in-law have always been misunderstood and no one has ever taken up their side of the argument properly, Jane is determined to set the record straight and plead the cause of the most maligned race on the face of the earth.

(Hardback)

Together with Voltaire, Diderot was a remarkable figure of the French Enlightenment, as a philosopher, journalist and novelist. In this book, a young girl's enforced enclosure in a convent gives Diderot the chance to explore themes such as religious hypocrisy and sexual repression.

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(Paperback)

In nineteenth-century England, Dorthea Brooke's wishes to defy social conventions are inhibited by the strict nature of her surroundings.

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Features Dorothea Brooke; Dr Lydgate; spendthrift Fred Vincy; and steadfast Mary Garth. This book explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of modern changes.

(Hardback)

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, published 1871-2, is set in the imaginary county of Loamshire during the years of unrest preceding the 1832 Reform Bill. With its complex plot, broad canvas and huge cast of characters, it has long been recognized as one of the few truly classic English novels.

(Hardback)

(Hardback)

Mike is a seriously good cricketer who forms an unlikely alliance with old Etonian Psmith ('the P is silent') after they both find themselves fish out of water at a new school, Sedleigh, where they eventually overcome the hostility of others and their own prejudices to become stars.

(Hardback)

This charming story of the Jackson cricketing dynasty describes the adventures of Mike Jackson at boarding school as he makes his way up the sporting ladder to the first eleven.

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Originally serialized in issues of "The Christian Recorder" between 1886 and 1888, the three works contained in this text have been specially written for a black audience.

(Paperback, Main)

Su Jishi, the adolescent son of the head of the Chinese traders' association, the men licensed to deal with foreign merchants in the port, is suddenly burdened with responsibility for his powerful family after his father's unexpected death.

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The next Angela Thirkell novel in the hugely successful series of charming English comedies set in the fictional county of Barsetshire.

(Paperback)

Full of dark humour, wicked irony and razor sharp insight, this is one of the most intelligent and hilarious works of the 20th Century.