Series: Collins Classics

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil. After taking an elixir created in his laboratory, mild-mannered Dr Jekyll is transformed into the cruel and despicable Mr Hyde. Although seemingly harmless at first, things soon descend into chaos and Jekyll quickly realises...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words’ Best known for his remarkable novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s essay writings throughout the 1930s and 40s are just as compelling. From Why I Write to Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging, his...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. ’I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two’ A London lawyer is drawn into a series of strange occurrences concerning his old friend Henry Jekyll and the...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. 'We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.' Miserable and down on his luck, young Huck Finn escapes his drunken father by...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am! Challenging the hypocrisy and social conventions of the rural Victorian world, Tess of the...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw’s classic play and satire of the British class system, was first performed in 1913.

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning. Written at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Persuasion is a tale of love, heartache and the determination of one woman as she strives to reignite...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned on its publication in 1928, creating a storm of controversy. Lawrence tells the story of Constance Chatterley’s marriage to Sir Clifford, an aristocratic and intellectual who is paralysed from the waist down after the First World War. Desperate for an heir and embarrassed by...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland begins with Alice getting very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, having nothing to do. She peeks into the book her sister is reading, but it has no pictures or conversations, leading Alice to think, "and what is the use of a...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. When Charles Marlow agrees to captain a steamer up the Congo in search of...

The Great Gatsby, known as the Great American Novel of love and betrayal set in the Jazz Age. I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited – they went there. Considered one of the all-time great American works of fiction,...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Pride and Prejudice, Austen's best-loved tale of love, marriage, and society in class-conscious Georgian England, still...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life. At the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud published a controversial and groundbreaking theory. Our dreams, he proposed, are as complex and multifaceted as human nature itself, and understanding the unconscious mind...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. Stars, hide your fires;Let not light see my black and deep desires. Fresh from victory on the battlefield, the celebrated general and nobleman Macbeth receives a prophecy from three witches that he will one day become king of Scotland. Driven by his own ambition and that of his...

Now a Major Film “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever.” Anne Elliot is persuaded to reject a marriage proposal from handsome Captain Wentworth because he lacks rank or fortune. But when he returns home from the Navy, more than seven years...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. Jane Eyre, a timeless piece of literature, takes readers on a captivating journey through the life of its resilient heroine, Jane Eyre. Born into harsh circumstances, Jane is orphaned at a young age and faces the cruelty of her aunt, only to be further tested by the austere conditions...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. When Basil Hallward paints the portrait of young, handsome Dorian Gray, he falls prey to his dazzling beauty. Afraid that his youth and looks will waste away, Dorian expresses a wish that his portrait, and...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. Scientist Pierre Aronnax and his colleagues set out on an expedition to...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘The rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open…’ Victor Frankenstein’s monster is stitched together...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. Wuthering Heights “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” Heathcliff, an orphan, wild and unkempt, is taken in by Mr Earnshaw and raised as his son at Wuthering Heights on the bleak Yorkshire moors. He is drawn to Earnshaw’s...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ Elizabeth Bennet, full of vivacity and wit, lives a quiet country existence with her four sisters....

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Ah, but let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart. A tale of sin, punishment and atonement, The Scarlet Letter exposes the moral rigidity of a 17th-Century Puritan New England community when faced with the illegitimate child of...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.’ Written at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Persuasion is a tale of love, heartache and the determination of one woman as she strives to...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘Though lovers be lost love shall not;And death shall have no dominion.’As a child growing up in South Wales, Dylan Thomas was obsessed with words. In adulthood his literary talents and stormy personal life would both shock and captivate his contemporaries. Today, he is considered to be arguably...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Charles Dickens’s classic tale of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge’s encounters with the ghosts of Christmas past, present and yet to come is timeless and captivating. In A Christmas Carol, readers journey through an unforgettable transformation of spirit and heart.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule. Living with his sister and her husband, Pip is an orphan without any expectations. It is only when he begins to visit a rich old woman, Miss Havisham, and her adopted niece that he begins...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee…” Few literary masterpieces cast quite as awesome a shadow as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Captain...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars… First published in 1855, and edited, revised and expanded over thirty years, Leaves of Grass has become one of the most celebrated poetry collections in the history of American literature. A master...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out’ In the first volume of her critical essays, Virginia Woolf discusses the greatest authors of the literary canon -...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. When Alice follows the White Rabbit down a magical tunnel, her world is changed forever. In Wonderland, a place where nothing is quite as it seems, Alice meets the Cheshire Cat, who can disappear at will;...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Published in 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s pamphlet The Communist Manifesto is a landmark text in socialist and Marxist history – a rallying cry for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society by the working classes.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. The animals at Manor Farm have had enough of Farmer Jones — he’s drunk, reckless and cares little for their welfare. When the boar, Old Major, shares his revolutionary plans, the animals are convinced they can thrive on their own once the despot Jones is overthrown. But as...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. Wuthering Heights poses the question: Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil? Set on the bleak moors of Yorkshire, Lockwood is forced to seek shelter at Wuthering Heights, the home of his new landlord, Heathcliff. The intense and wildly...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. A green horse great and tall;A steed full stiff to guide,In broidered bridle allHe worthily bestrides Dating from around 1400 and composed by an anonymous writer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was first translated and published almost 200 years ago. Its epic nature has not been dimmed...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow. After the sudden death of her wealthy parents, spoilt Mary Lennox is sent from India to live with her uncle in the austere Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire Moors. Neglected and uncherished, she is horribly lonely, until one...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. In her second volume of essays, Virginia Woolf delves deeper into the delights of reading....

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Autobiographical in tone, Joyce’s tale of Stephen Dedalus’ journey into adulthood explores the intellectual and moral development of...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of...

HarperCollins is proud to present our range of timeless literary classics. ‘It’s reactionary to believe in God in our days,’ I said, ‘but I am the devil, so I may be believed in.’ When corrupt landowner Fyodor Karamazov is murdered awaiting an illicit rendezvous, his estranged sons immediately fall under suspicion. Was it Dmitri, the reckless hedonist engaged in a...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. We have declared before that it is not only expedient but necessary for a prince to take care his foundations be good, otherwise his fabric will be sure to fail. Considered one of the first works of modern philosophy, Machiavelli’s The Prince is an intense study on the...

Now a major movie.HarperCollins is proud to present our range of timeless literary classics All my days are consumed in longing – to travel home and see the day of my arrival dawn. If a god must shatter me upon the wine-dark sea, so be it.One of the most enduring tales ever told, The Odyssey is the original homecoming story....

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night. Arguably the greatest love story ever told, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet continues to touch modern audiences with its passionate depiction of the tragic romance between two young lovers. With a bitter...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. At the peak of European Imperialism, steamboat captain Charles Marlow travels deep into the...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. A prophet waits to board a ship after 12 years away from his homeland. His journey is interrupted by a group of people who ask him to impart his wisdom before...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘A slow and heavy step, which had been heard upon the stairs and in the passage, paused immediately outside the door. Then there was a loud and authoritative tap.’ Set against the foggy backdrop of London and the English countryside, each story in this quintessential collection unravels an...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens tells the story of Pip, an orphan without any expectations – he has no name, no fortune, and no prospects. It is only when he begins to visit Miss Havisham,...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert are expecting a young orphan boy to help them with farm work at Green Gables. But when a skinny, red-haired girl turns up instead, immediately certain she's home, they get much more than they bargained for. Spirited, adventurous, and imaginative, Anne Shirley quickly charms...

HarperCollins is proud to present a range of best-loved, essential classics. Seeking escape from their unfulfilling marriages and monotonous lives in 1920s England, two women become transfixed by an advertisement to rent a medieval Italian castle for the month of April. Lotty Wilkins, who feels stifled by her solicitor husband, and pious Rose Arbuthnot, discontented in her relationship, are joined...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbours’ Rejecting the conventional narratives of the time, Middlemarch shows a realistic portrayal of Victorian village life. Peopling this ground-breaking work...

Now a major movie. HarperCollins is proud to present our range of timeless literary classics. All my days are consumed in longing – to travel home and see the day of my arrival dawn. If a god must shatter me upon the wine-dark sea, so be it. One of the most enduring tales ever told, The Odyssey is the original...

HarperCollins is proud to present our range of timeless literary classics. ‘I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence.’ When lonely nineteen-year-old Laura welcomes an enigmatic stranger into her home in the heart of the Stryian forest, she has no idea that the beautiful Carmilla is not what she seems. Laura’s childhood nightmares have resurfaced,...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. I am a dreamer; I have so little real life that I look upon such moments as this now, as so rare, that I cannot help going over such moments again in my dreams.‘White Nights’ is the bittersweet story of a lonely young man’s love found and lost...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Phileas Fogg was one of those mathematically exact people, who, never hurried and always ready, are economical of their steps and their motions. He never made one stride too many, always going by the shortest route. He did not give an idle look. He did not allow himself...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Originally published in 1903–1904, The Return of Sherlock Holmes is the thirteen-story collection featuring one of the greatest-ever fictional detectives. Three years after the supposed death of Sherlock Holmes and his archenemy Professor Moriarty in the torrent of Reichenbach Falls, Holmes makes a disguised reappearance to Baker Street...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. Dubliners captures the essence of early 20th century Dublin through its fifteen compelling stories. From a child grappling with a priest's death to a young woman contemplating a life away from the mundanity of Dublin with her lover, these narratives vividly portray the daily lives of ordinary Dubliners. With...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. The Secret Garden unfolds with Mary Lennox, an orphan sent to live with her uncle in his austere manor on the moors. Mary is a lonely and unhappy child until a chance meeting with Dickon, her servant's brother, sets her on a path to self-discovery. Through their friendship and...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Written in 1876, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River.

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘The creature’s teeth were buried in the gunwale, and it lifted the whole thing out of the water like a lion can a roebuck…’ Scientist Pierre Aronnax, together with his faithful servant Conseil and the whaler Ned Land, is invited to join a hazardous voyage to the Pacific Ocean...

"I sometimes fear we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs." In 1936, George Orwell volunteered as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War. In Homage to Catalonia, first published just before the outbreak of World War II, Orwell documents the chaos and bloodshed of that moment in history and the voices...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. But I am not like other boys! I always tell the truth. The story of Pinocchio has remained one of the best-loved children's tales for over a century. However, the original 1883 novel about the adventures of the mischievous marionette on his quest to become a real boy...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. A London lawyer is drawn into a series of strange occurrences concerning his old friend Henry Jekyll and the...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'I do not cling to life sufficiently to fear death.' Adventurous and spirited in tone, The Three Musketeers is considered one of the greatest historical French novels. When Athos, Porthos, and Aramis befriend a young and determined country boy, d'Artagnan, together they confront the scheming King's Minister, Cardinal...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Journey to the Centre of the Earth is a science-fiction classic by Jules Verne where, “From that hour we had no further occasion for the exercise of reason, or judgment, or skill, or contrivance. We were henceforth to be hurled along, the playthings of the fierce elements of...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words. When his beloved owners are forced to sell him, Black Beauty leaves his life as a young, carefree colt and embarks...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. The wolf thought to himself, "What a tender young creature! what a nice plump mouthful – she will be better to eat than the old woman. I must act craftily, so as to catch both." Collected by the German Grimm brothers, these folk tales have captured the imaginations...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. The Scarlet Letter 'Ah, but let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.' A tale of sin, punishment, and atonement, The Scarlet Letter exposes the moral rigidity of a 17th-century Puritan New England community when faced with the...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. Oliver Twist has asked for more! Fleeing the workhouse, Oliver finds himself taken under the wing of the Artful Dodger and caught up with a group of pickpockets in London. As he tries to free himself from their clutches, he becomes immersed in the seedy underbelly of the...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. I wish as well as every body else to be perfectly happy; but like every body else it must be in my own way. When the Dashwood family are forced into more modest circumstances, sisters Marianne and Elinor also find themselves suddenly entangled in matters of the heart. Passionate...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Young Charlotte Heywood arrives in Sanditon, a newly established seaside resort, with the Parkers: patrons and enthusiastic promoters of the town. Just as the town seeks to reinvent itself as a fashionable destination, Charlotte Heywood attempts to begin anew amongst its residents. As she begins to settle into...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. The real evils, indeed, of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself… Beautiful, rich, self-assured and witty, Emma Woodhouse delights in matchmaking those around her, with no apparent care for her own...