First published in "Cornhill Magazine" in 1878, "Daisy Miller" is Henry James' novella, which concerns the courtship of its titular character, the beautiful young American girl Daisy Miller. While travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy is taken by the delightfulness of the continent, which unlike her brother, she finds superior to their hometown of Schenectady, New York. Her brother introduces her to Frederick Winterbourne, whom she agrees to...

"At the Back of the North Wind" is a classic children's story first serialized in England in 1868 and published into a book in 1871 by the Scottish author George MacDonald. This enchanting fairy tale follows Diamond, a sweet, innocent, and joyful young stable boy in Victorian London who goes on adventures with the majestic North Wind. The North Wind is personified as a lovely and mysterious woman, both severe and kind, who teaches young Diamond about...

First published in 1903, "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" is the charming and classic children's novel beloved the world over. Written by the American author and educator Kate Douglas Wiggin, it is the story of young and poor Rebecca Rowena Randall, who goes to live with her spinster aunts in the town of Riverboro when she is ten years-old. Rebecca's father had died three years before and the family farm had become heavily indebted. In order to ease the...

After reading an article proclaiming that a new railroad in India has made it possible to circumnavigate the globe in eighty days, Phileas Fogg makes a £20,000 wager that he can do just that. Alongside his faithful valet Passepartout, a carpetbag full of travelling money, and a carefully laid out itinerary, Fogg sets out on a journey around the world only to quickly discover that his travels do not go as planned. Despite being hindered at every turn,...

Captain MacWhirr cannot fathom anything outside the facts of his own life. His first mate, Mr. Jukes, is the perfect contrast as an imaginative man prone to speaking in figurative language. Though they are opposites, MacWhirr and Jukes respect each other and run a tight ship, until the crew notices the barometer predicting a serve storm. Jukes and the crew suggest alternate paths to MacWhirr, but he is unconvinced. Since MacWhirr has not experienced...

Captains Courageous is a novel by Rudyard Kipling, that follows the adventures of fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne Jr., the spoiled son of a railroad tycoon, after he is saved from drowning by a Portuguese fisherman in the north Atlantic. The book's title comes from the ballad "Mary Ambree", which starts, "When captains courageous, whom death could not daunt". Kipling had previously used the same title for an article on businessmen as the new adventurers,...

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed Edmond Dantes spends fourteen bitter years imprisoned in grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth treasure and use it to plot destruction of men responsive for his incarceration.

One hundred years after inheriting a seven-gabled house with a dark and cursed past, Clifford and Hepzibah are old and nearly destitute. Descendants of the cursed Colonel Pyncheon, they have resorted to taking in boarders and running a struggling cent store to support themselves. When a distant relative, untouched by Colonel Pyncheon's curse, moves into the gabled house and takes over the cent store, her charm and disposition brings success to the...