Everyman's Library CLASSICS

In The Guermantes Way Proust's narrator recalls his initiation into the dazzling world of Parisian high society. Looking back over his time in the glamorous salons of the aristocracy, he satirises this shallow world and his own youthful infatuation with it. His observations, and his experiences with his lover Albertine, also educate him in the volatile nature of desire as he walks the path towards adulthood.

Marcel continues his voyage of discovery through the homosexual world, where affairs of the ageing Baron de Charlus lead to unexpected and hilarious adventures.

In the opening volume of Proust's great novel, the narrator travels backwards in time in order to tell the story of a love affair that had taken place before his own birth. Swann's jealous love for Odette provides a prophetic model of the narrator's own relationships. All Proust's great themes - time and memory, love and loss, art and the artistic vocation - are here in kernel form.

In the second volume from Trollope’s series of six ‘Palliser’ novels, we probe deep into the life of British politics. The story is told from the standpoint of a young Irish MP whose private and public affairs become entangled. Trollope’s genius for making such matters exciting is displayed in full as he explores Phineas’s political ambitions, his romantic attachments and the steep learning curve he has to climb in both.

As usual in these novels, there is a large cast of delightful supporting characters, enlivened further by the author’s rich sense of their comic possibilities. This talent for detail is combined with a magisterial overview which lifts the book above parochial politics, making it of interest to any reader interested in the study of personality and action.

Written over a period of more than half a century, Tolstoy’s enchanting short stories and novellas reflect every aspect of his developing art and outlook. Volume 1 of the Everyman Collected Shorter Fiction is dominated by the characteristic experiences of his early life as soldier, land-owner, husband and father, the life which shaped Anna Karenina and War and Peace. It also includes several short fables which point to his later preoccupation with the religious life. Volume 2 reveals how these spiritual intimations flowered into a series of extraordinary late masterpieces which equal anything in the earlier novels for intensity and power. Readers of The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius, Master and Man and Hadji Murad will recognize the brilliant younger novelist, now transfigured by his passionate quest for salvation and forgiveness.

Generally agreed to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century – and possibly any other – Proust’s masterpiece is here presented in the latest revision to the classic Scott Moncrieff translation. On the surface a traditional Bildungsroman describing the narrator’s journey of self-discovery, this huge and complex book is also a panoramic and richly comic portrait of France in the author’s lifetime, and a profound meditation on the nature of art, love, time, memory and death. But for most readers it is the characters of the novel who loom the largest: Swann and Odette, Monsieur de Charlus, Morel, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Françoise, Saint-Loup and so many others – Giants, as the author calls them, immersed in Time.

Augustine’s spiritual autobiography is not only a major document in the history of Christianity and a classic of Roman Africa: it also marks a vital moment in the history of Western culture. As Augustine explains how, when and why he became the man he is at the time of writing, he probes the great themes which others were to explore after him – faith, time, truth, identity and self-understanding – in a detail unmatched in ancient literature.

Illustrated with vivid portraits of friends, family, colleagues and enemies, The Confessions provides a remarkably candid account of the passage from a life of sensuality and superstition to a genuine spiritual awakening. The result is a powerful narrative of one man’s religious journey which continues to shape the way we write and behave today.

First assembled on paper in the fourteenth century, the eleven stories in The Mabinogion reach far back into the oral traditions of Welsh poetry. Closely linked to the Arthurian legends – King Arthur himself appears in one of the stories – they summon up a world of mystery and magic which is still evoked by the landscape so vividly described in them.

Mingling fantasy with tales of chivalry, they prefigure the great romances of the Middle Ages but stand on their own merits as magnificent evocations of a golden age of Celtic civilization.

It has been said that, after the Bible, Plato's dialogues are the most influential books in Western culture. And of the dialogues, the Symposium is the most delightful and accessible, requiring no special knowledge of ancient Greek philosophy or customs. Dramatizing a party in fifth-century B.C. Athens, the deceptively unassuming Symposium introduces--in the guise of convivial after-dinner conversation--profound ideas about the nature of love. In Phaedrus, here published together with the Symposium, Plato discusses the place of eloquence in expounding truth. In both dialogues, Socrates plays the leading role, by turns teasing, arguing, analyzing, joking, inspiring, and cajoling his followers into understanding ideas that have remained central to Western thought through the centuries.

Confucius is one of the most humane, rational, and lucid of moral teachers, concerned not with arcane metaphysics, but with practical issues of life and conduct.

What is virtue?

What sort of life is most conducive to happiness?

How should the state be ruled?

What is the proper relationship between human beings and their environment?


In this classic translation by Arthur Waley, the questions Confucius addressed two and a half millennia ago remain as relevant as ever.

It is hard to imagine how radically the tender songs and simple stories in this collection changed the history of English poetry, but Wordsworth exerted a profound influence on the whole of nineteeth-century culture in Britain and America.

His literary revolution was founded on three principles: introspection, nature worship and the cult of ordinary experience. These three he blended together in a verse which is simple in manner but profound and deeply moving in content. In an age of revolutionary upheaval, industrial stress and religious doubt, Wordsworth rediscovered spiritual value in the individual’s encounter with nature. In our own age of ecological disaster and moral uncertainty, his achievement speaks to us more urgently than ever.

From the poet’s extensive output, this comprehensive selection includes everything non-specialist readers are likely to need.

George Eliot’s last novel, published in 1876, weaves together two stories, one about Gwendolen Harleth, the spoilt beauty who marries for money, the other concerning the mysterious hero of the title whose search for his true destiny leads him towards Zionism. All Eliot’s great themes – moral choice, the role of chance, the interaction of characters with their environment – are worked out with her incomparable power, and many readers have agreed with F. R. Leavis that the first section of the novel is the greatest achievement in English fiction.

Set in mid 19th-century Russia, Demons examines the effect of a charismatic but unscrupulous self-styled revolutionary leader on a group of credulous followers.Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a “novel-pamphlet” in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia–a novel that is rivaled only by The Brothers Karamazov as Dostoevsky’s greatest.

The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky continue their acclaimed series of Dostoevsky translations with this novel, also known as The Possessed.

Volume 1 Covers the period from 1866 to 1891, the years in which James was evolving and perfecting his art as a storyteller. It includes such well-known masterpieces as Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, The Siege of London and the Lesson of the Mast, and many other tales in which james established his favourite characters and situations: the American girl in Europe, the solitary observer, the social climber, the literacy lion.

Volume 2 Takes us from A private Life of 1892 to James's last story, A Round of Visits, published in 1910. These are the magnificient works of James' maturity - The Death of the Lion, The Altar of the Dead, The Figyre in the Carpet, The Turn of the Screw, In the Cage, The Beast in the Jungle and many others - in which the deepening darkness of the author's own life casts a tragic but heroic shadow on the themes of his youth.