Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...

The adventures of an orphaned young man in Victorian England who is given a great deal of money by an unknown benefactor to enable him to live as a gentleman, pursuing a good education and fulfilling great expectations.

Seven-year-old Sara Crewe dreams of helping the poor and needy. But after her father's death, she is left penniless and is forced to work at the exclusive London boarding school where she was once a student.

When David Copperfield's widowed mother remarries, David suffers from his stepfather's abuse. At age 8, David is sent away to a harsh school where the principal routinely beats the students. David's circumstances become even worse when he is removed from school and, at age 10, forced to labor from morning to night in a London warehouse. David then decides to take desperate action. He will run away to his great-aunt, who lives in Dover. Having never...

After the death of her foster mother, sixteen-year-old Kat goes to London to seek the answers to her parentage, and surprisingly finds herself invited into Queen Elizabeth's court

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections: between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed.

When Clara vanishes after the puppeteer Grisini and two orphaned assistants were at her twelfth birthday party, suspicion of kidnapping chases the trio away from London and soon the two orphans are caught in a trap set by Grisini's ancient rival, a witch with a deadly inheritance to shed before it is too late

The now-married Jo has opened a school for boys in her late aunt's estate of Plumfield--one where pillow fights are allowed and the students are encouraged to explore their interests. With Jo's children, nieces, and nephews; various boarding students; and an orphaned street musician, life at Plumfield is never dull. But when a trouble-making new boy arrives and the students' mischief gets out of control, Jo's and her family's lives are turned upside...

"Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she's been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am. She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London's fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby's...

With her success riding on her ability to keep her real identity secret, Zillah, an orphan from the slums of London who has achieved theatrical fame as The Great Amazonia, "a savage queen from darkest Africa," finds her planning upended when she is torn between two men--a mysterious black gentleman and her boss's friend who offers her the world