Натаниель Готорн (1804–1864) – один из наиболее значительных американских писателей XIX века. Предлагаем вниманию читателей одно из самых известных его произведений, роман «Алая буква» (1850), первый американский роман, вызвавший широкий резонанс в Европе.
В книге приводится неадаптированный текст романа в сокращении с комментариями и словарем.
First published in 1850, “The Scarlet Letter” is the work that would establish Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literary legacy. It is the story of Hester Prynne, a young attractive woman who has been convicted of the crime of adultery and has been sentenced to wear a scarlet letter “A” sewn to her dress. As the result of the affair, Hester has a child named Pearl and because the man with whom she has committed this act refuses to come forward she finds herself having to raise the child alone. The novel,...
"The Scarlet Pimpernel" is considered one of the greatest adventure novels of all time. It is the first in a series of stories about Percy Blakeney, an Englishman in France during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, who lives a double life as an English aristocrat and a swashbuckling masked rescuer of French aristocrats from the guillotine. «The Scarlet Pimpernel» is the classic tale of action and adventure that literally invented the genre of the masked avenger.
In the late 18th century, France was in the throes of the French Revolution. Of particular tumult during this conflict were the years known as the “Reign of Terror”, a time in which a revolutionary tribunal executed thousands of French citizens. It is during the “Reign of Terror” in which Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s “The Scarlet Pimpernel” is set. “The Scarlet Pimpernel” is the story of Sir Percy Blakeney, a chivalrous Englishman married to the beautiful French actress, Marguerite St. Just, with...
By 1792, the idealism of the French Revolution has degenerated into a Reign of Terror. Ruthless mobs rule the streets of Paris, and each day, hundreds of royalists are sacrificed to the guillotine, with hundreds more condemned to follow. Their only hope lies in rescue by the Scarlet Pimpernel, the daring leader of an English faction that spirits aristocrats across the Channel to safety. This historical adventure tale first appeared in 1905, but its irresistible blend of romance, intrigue, and...
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.‘They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic – to terror, too, perhaps.’Considered one of Conrad’s most political works, The Secret Agent is set against the dismal backdrop of a drab and alienating London, and tells the story of the bombing of Greenwich Observatory by a group of...
A classic and thrilling tale of espionage and murder, Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent” was first published in 1907. Set in London in 1886, the novel centers around Mr. Adolf Verloc, a spy who owns a small shop and lives with his wife Winnie, her mother and her mentally disabled brother Stevie, above his business. He is also a member of a largely ineffectual anarchist group, whom he meets with regularly to discuss politics and produce anarchist literature. Unknown to his fellow anarchists,...
In the back streets of nineteenth-century London, a group of revolutionaries plot an incident intended to turn English complacency on its ear. Their objective: the destruction of one of the nation's proudest monuments of scientific achievement, the Greenwich Observatory. Unbeknownst to the schemers, however, their ringleader is an agent provocateur, driven by a complex array of ambiguous motives and conflicting loyalties.As this masterpiece of atmospheric realism and psychological depth...