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'Because one book had a sort of success he imagined his struggles were over.'Scholarly, anxious Edwin Reardon had achieved a precarious career as the writer of serious fiction. On the strength of critical acclaim for his fourth novel, he has married the refined Amy Yule. But the brilliant future Amy expected has evaded her husband. The catastrophe of the Reardon's failing marriage is set among the rising and falling fortunes of novelists, journalists, and scholars who labour'in the valley of the shadow of books'. George Gissing's New Grub Street was written at breakneck speed in the autumn of 1890 and is considered his best novel. Intensely autobiographical, it reflects the literary and cultural crisis in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century.

Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity investigates the significance of a new form of sexual identity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Young women of the lower-middle and working classes were increasingly abandoning domestic service in favour of occupations of contested propriety. They inspired both moral unease and erotic fascination. Working Girls considers representations of four highly glamorised yet controversial types of women worker: telegraphists and typists (in newly-feminised offices), shop assistants (in the new department stores), and barmaids (in the new'gin palaces'of major British cities). Economically emancipated (more or less) and liberated (more or less) from the protection and constraints of home and family, shop-girls, barmaids, typists, and telegraphists became mass media sensations. They energised a wide range of late-Victorian and Modernist fiction. This study will bring late-Victorian and Modernist British writers into intimate conversation with a substantial new archive of ephemeral sources often regarded as remote from high art and its concerns: popular fiction; music hall and musical comedy; beauty pageants and fairground exhibitions; visual art and early film; careers manuals; magazine and periodical journalism; moral reform crusades, Royal Commissions, and attempts at protective legislation. Working Girls argues that these seductive yet perilous young women helped writers negotiate anxieties about the state of literary culture in the United Kingdom. Crucially, they preoccupy novelists who were themselves beleaguered by anxieties over cultural capital, the shifting pressures of the literary marketplace, or controversies about the morality of fiction (often leading to the threat of censorship). In articulating questions about sexual integrity, Working Girls articulate often submerged questions about textual integrity and the role of the modern novel.

'The fact is, Mark, that you and I cannot conceive the depth of fraud in such a man as that.'The Reverend Mark Robarts makes a mistake. Drawn into a social set at odds with his clerical responsibilities, he guarantees the debts of an unscrupulous Member of Parliament. He stands to lose his reputation, and his family, future, and home are all in peril. His patroness, the proud and demanding Lady Lufton, is offended and the romantic hopes of Mark's sister Lucy, courted by Lady Lufton's son, are in jeopardy. Pride and ambition are set against love and integrity in a novel that has remained one of Trollope's most popular stories. Set against ecclesiastical events in the Barchester diocese and informed by British political instability after the Crimean War, Trollope's fourth Barchester novel was his first major success. A compelling history of uncertain futures, Framley Parsonage is a vivid exploration of emotional and geographical displacement that grew out of Trollope's own experiences as he returned to England from Ireland in 1859. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'I do not know that one ought to be surprised at anything.'The Duke of Omnium is overwhelmed by the death of his vivacious wife, Lady Glencora. Once the British Prime Minister, he is now in sole charge of his three wilful children. Lord Gerald has been sent down from University; Lord Silverbridge has defected from the Liberal cause of his father's party to the Conservative, and is badly in debt; Lady Mary has fallen in love with Frank Tregear, a commoner with a will of iron but no money. The Duke, troubled and without easy relationships with any of his children, tries to impose his own will. But the result seems to move the novel towards calamity. Searching the great topics of compromise and principle, of obedience and dissent, of personal integrity and the conflicts between generations, The Duke's Children is a domestic story with far-reaching political issues at stake. It is a fitting end to the Palliser series, one of the most remarkable achievements of British fiction. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.