Elizabeth Klett
The Custom of the Country (version 2)
Edith Wharton's 1913 novel is a devastating critique of American upward mobility, told through the journey of Undine Spragg from fictional M…
The Island
Written late in his career, Byron's narrative poem The Island tells the famous story of the mutiny on board the Bounty, and follows the muti…
Madame de Treymes
Edith Wharton's 1907 novella explores the milieu of Americans living abroad in Paris. New Yorker John Durham travels to Paris to woo an old…
The Dead (version 2)
This novella is the final story in Joyce's collection Dubliners. It describes a Christmas party given by Kate and Julia Morkan, two elderly …
The Fifth Queen
The Fifth Queen invites listeners into the tumultuous world of Tudor England, where ambition and desire intertwine in the court of King Henr…
Olalla
"Olalla" was a "shilling shocker" written for the Christmas season in 1885, just before the publication of Stevenson's D…
Sanctuary (version 2)
Sanctuary is a poignant exploration of love, betrayal, and the quest for personal freedom, set against the backdrop of early 20th-century so…
The Return of the Soldier
In 1916 on an isolated country estate just outside London, Captain Chris Baldry, a shell-shocked captain suffering from amnesia, makes a bit…
Quicksand
Quicksand is a 1928 novel by Nella Larsen, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance. It focuses on Helga Crane, a mixed-race woman who is a school…
Shakespeare's Sonnets (version 4)
Shakespeare's sequence of 154 sonnets deals with such themes as love, time, death, immortality, lust, and sex. The poems follow but also dep…
The Princess
The Princess is a serio-comic blank verse narrative poem, written by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1847. The poem tells the story of an hero…
Crucial Instances
Crucial Instances is a captivating collection of short stories by Edith Wharton, published in 1901. In this anthology, Wharton explores the …
News From Nowhere
News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialis…
The Greater Inclination
This is Edith Wharton's earliest published collection of short stories (1899). Like much of her later work, they touch on themes of marriag…
Goblin Market and Other Poems
Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) is British writer Christina Rossetti's first book of poetry. The title poem is her most famous work: a …
Life in the Iron Mills
This 1861 novella was the first published work by Rebecca Harding Davis: writer, social reformer, and pioneer of literary realism. It tell…
In Memoriam A.H.H.
In Memoriam is Tennyson's elegiac tribute to his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died in 1833 at the age of 22. Tennyson wrote this long poe…
Ophelia, the Rose of Elsinore
This story is from Mary Cowden Clarke's multi-volume work The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, in which she imagined the early lives of c…
Maude
Maude is a novella by Christina Rossetti, written in 1850 but published posthumously in 1897. Considered by scholars to be semi-autobiograph…
Moving the Mountain
Moving the Mountain is a feminist utopian novel written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It was published serially in Perkins Gilman's periodica…