The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas is part of the novel The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years After, published in serial form between 1857-50. It is also the last of the D'Artagnan stories written by Dumas and the three musketeers are the real heroes of the story, though the title is given to the man in the iron mask.

The story opens with Aramis (one of the musketeers who is now a priest) taking the last confession of a prisoner who is condemned to be executed soon. His confession comes as a thunderbolt to the former musketeer. This mysterious person is actually the identical twin brother of Louis XIV. He was ordered to be killed by his own parents, Louis XIII ...

Dumas's 'Celebrated Crimes' was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language -- has minced no words -- to describe the violent scenes of a violent time.
In some instances facts appear distorted out of their true perspective, and in others the author makes unwarranted charges. The careful, mature reader, for whom the books are intended, will recognize, and allow for, this fact.
The first volume comprises the annals of the Borgias and the Cenci. The name of the noted and notorious Florentine family has become a synonym for intrigue and violence, and yet the Borgias have not been without stanch defenders in history.
Another famous Italian story is that of the Cenci....

As a girl, Lady Duff-Gordon was noted both for her beauty and intelligence. As an author, she is most famous for this collection of letters from Egypt. Lady Duff-Gordon had tuberculosis, and went to Egypt for her health. This collection of her personal letters to her mother and her husband. By all accounts everyone loved her, and the letters are very personal in style and content. The letters are as much an introduction to her person as a record of her life on the Upper Nile.

One great universal law runs through the realm of nature. Our Saviour gave it in a sentence: 'First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.' It is with the desire to show that the same law rules in another of God's creations — The Bible — that this little volume has been prepared. The Bible has as literally 'grown' as has an oak tree; and probably there is no more likeness between the Bible as we know it to-day and its earliest beginning, than we find between the mighty tree, and the acorn from which it sprang. The subject is so vast that we have not attempted anything beyond the briefest outline. Our purpose has been merely to give some idea of the origin of the Bib...

Trilby, published in 1894, fits into the gothic horror genre which was undergoing a revival during the Fin de siècle and is one of the most popular novels of its time, perhaps the second best selling novel of the Fin de siècle period after Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

The story of the poor artist’s model Trilby O’Ferrall, transformed into a diva under the spell of the evil musical genius Svengali, created a sensation. Soap, songs, dances, toothpaste, and Trilby, Florida were all named for the heroine, and a variety of soft felt hat with an indented crown (worn in the London stage production of a dramatization of the novel) came to be called a trilby.

The plot inspired Gaston Le...

The Quest of the Silver Fleece is a story of romance, race economics and politics set around the 1900s. Here, a traditionally educated boy and an unschooled “swamp girl” each begin a journey toward love, ambition and redemption in the “Old South.”

"Die Judenbuche – Ein Sittengemälde aus dem gebirgichten Westfalen" ist eine Novelle von Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, die erstmals 1842 im Cotta'schen Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser erschien. Sie behandelt ein Verbrechen und vor allem dessen Vor- und Nachgeschichte und spielt in dem entlegenen westfälischen "Dorf B." in einem deutschen Kleinstaat des 18. Jahrhunderts, vor den Umwälzungen, die die Französische Revolution für Europa mit sich brachte. Das Stück wird außerdem als Milieustudie und Kriminalgeschichte verstanden.

The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service is a boys adventure story set in WWI – Three College Chums join the military and face the perils of spies, submarines and enemy soldiers in the trenches of embattled Europe. An engaging story set in a period where good guys wore white hats, bad guys wore black hats and every chapter ends with a cliffhanger so you have to come back for more!

Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French Army was court martialed in 1894 on a trumped up charge of treason and condemned to life imprisonment on Devil’s island, a penal colony off French Guiana. His prison diary, published as Five Years of My Life in 1901 is a heroic tale of survival against daunting odds: isolation, deprivation, torture . . Alfred left behind in Paris his wife Lucie, who, forbidden to join her husband in exile, struggled to protect their two children from the rampant anti-Semitism that swirled about them, while she begged her husband to hold onto life as she tried to clear his name. Excerpts from the letters that Alfred and Lucie wrote to each other, between Devil...

Published in 1900, Sister Carrie follows its protagonist, Carrie, as she resolutely makes her way through the bustling city of Chicago in the hope of achieving her ultimate goal of a securing a better and more glamorous life for herself. Effectively illustrating his reputation as one of America’s greatest naturalists, Dreiser deviates from the established norms and moral values present in the Victorian era, and instead focuses his attention on accurately portraying the basic instincts that influence human behavior.

The novel begins with the introduction of Caroline Meeber, an eighteen-year-old girl who leaves her rural hometown and travels to the bustling city of Chic...