Many new readers of Paradise Lost may be tempted to agree with Victorian critic Sir Walter Raleigh`s notorious description of the poem as a "monument to dead ideas"

Called the most widely read English novel of the twentieth century, D.H.Lawrence`s largely autobiographical Sons and Lovers tells the story of Paul Morel, a young artisit growing into manhood in a British working-class community near the Nottingham coalfields

Thomas Hardy`s first masterpiece, The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a scene of such heartlessness and cruelty that it still shocks readers today. A poor workman named Michael Henchard, in a fit of drunken rage, sells his wife and baby daughter to a stranger at a country fair.

The Virginian`s characters include: the hero, tall, taciturn, and unflappable, confident in his skills, careful of his honor, mysterious in his background; the heroin, the "schoolmarm from the East," dedicated to civilizing the untamed town but willing to adapt to its ways - up to a point; and the villain, who is a liar, a thief, a killer, and worst of all, a coward beneath his bluster

First published in 1840, the book convincingly recreates life at sea - the beauty and adventure, but also the cold, danger, and backbreaking labor

First published in 1911, The Plantom of the Opera has since been the basis for many adaptations, including Lon Chaney`s silent film and Andrew Lloyd Webber`s Tony award - winning Broadway musical. Today, this thriller is recognized not only as a compelling yarn with gothic overtones, but also an engrossing romance of stirring theatricality

Mary Lennox is the "little pig", sent to Misselthwaite Manor, on the Yorkshire moons, to live with her uncle after parents die of cholera

The raw material for The Interpretation of Dreams was provided by Freud himself. Spurred on by the death of his father, he began analyzing his own dreams, in the process recreating lost childhood memories and uncovering the roots of his own neuroses. He concluded that dreams were filled with latent meaning, their bizarre imagery and peculiar narratives concealing deep-seated, instinctual motives and desires

Dreiser`s first novel, Sister Carrie (1900) was inspired by the life of one of his own sisters, who had eloped to New York with her disreputable lover. Particularly in the unflinching tragedy of its final chapters, the novel broke new ground in American Fiction for its gritty realism and for the character of Carrie, who begins "a half-equipped little knight" and becomes a truly modern woman

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton`s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden age of Old New York, a time when society poeple "dreaded scandal more than disease"