In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia but despite his prolific activities – journalism, poetry, lecturing, short stories, publishing, criticism and experimentation with fictional genres, including the detective novel which he virtually invented with the publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) – he received scant recognition for his efforts until the publication of The Raven in 1845. The poem’s instant popularity gave him a new visibility in literary circles, but his personal situation remained desperate: poverty, illness, drink, and the physical decline and ultimate death of Virginia in 1847 led to his untimely and premature decline. In 1849 he was found sick, injured and semi-conscious in a Baltimore tavern. Taken to hospital, he lingered on for four days, but never recovered and on October 7th Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of 40.

He was one of the most original writers in the history of American letters – a genius who, thanks to his dire reputation, was tragically misunderstood during his lifetime. It was not until Baudelaire enthusiastically translated his work that he found a wider audience in Europe, and became not only an enormous influence on modern French literature but also on the acclaimed work of writers such as Dostoevsky, Conan Doyle and Jules Verne.

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Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was born in Odense, the son of a shoemaker. His early life was wretched, but he was adopted by a patron and became a short-story writer, novelist and playwright, though he remains best-known for his magical fairy tales which were published between 1835 and 1872.

For 150 years his stories have been delighting both adults and children. Packed with a light-hearted whimsy combined with a mature wisdom they are as entrancing as ever. Here are all of Andersen’s 154 tales, and among the favourites are The Red Shoes, The Mermaid, The Real Princess, The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Tinder Box and of course The Ugly Duckling.

Fairy Tales include:

• The Mermaid
• Hans Clodhopper
• The Flying Trunk
• The Rose Elf
• The Wild Swans
• The Elf-Hill
• The Real Princess
• A Picture from the Ramparts
• The Red Shoes
• Thumbelisa
• The Goblin and the Huckster
• The Bottle Neck
• The Steadfast Tin Soldier
• The Angel
• The Butterfly
• Psyche
• The Snail and the Rose-bush
• The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf
• The Nightingale
• The Storks
• The Little Match Girl
• Great Claus and Little Claus
• The Garden of Paradise
• Little Tuk
• The Wind’s Tale about Waldemar Daa and his Daughters
• The Snow Queen: A Tale in Seven Stories
• A Rose from Homer’s Grave
• The Emperor’s New Clothes
• The Naughty Boy
• Holger the Dane
• What the Moon Saw
• The Tinder Box
• The Story of a Mother
• The Marsh King’s Daughter
• The Galoshes of Fortune
• The Bronze Boar
• The Bell
• Olé Luköié, the Dustman
• The Swineherd
• The Travelling Companions
• The Ugly Duckling

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Translated by Margaret Taylor (1884).

Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and his brother Wilhelm (1786-1859) were philologists and folklorists. The brothers rediscovered a host of fairy tales, telling of princes and princesses in their castles, witches in their towers and forests, of giants and dwarfs, of fabulous animals and dark deeds.

Together with the well-known tales of Rapunzel, The Goose Girl, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel and Snow White, there are the darker tales such as Death’s Messengers which deserve to be better known, and which will appeal not only to all who are interested in the history of folklore, but also to all those who simply love good story-telling.

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Whether it is her sharp, ironic gaze at the Gothic genre invoked by the adventures of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey; the diffident and much put-upon Fanny Price struggling to cope with her emotions in Mansfield Park; her delightfully paced comedy of manners and the machinations of the sisters Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility; the quiet strength of Anne Elliot in Persuasion succeeding in a world designed to subjugate her very existence; and Emma – ‘a heroine whom no one but myself will like’ teased Austen – yet another irresistible character on fire with imagination and foresight. Indeed not unlike her renowned creator.

Jane Austen is as sure-footed in her steps through society’s whirlpools of convention and prosaic mores as she is in her sometimes restrained but ever precise and enduring prose.

Other Novels include: Pride and Prejudice and Lady Susan

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The stories are illustrated by the remarkable Sydney Paget from whom our images of Sherlock Holmes and his world derive and who first equipped Holmes with his famous deerstalker hat. The literary cult of Sherlock Holmes shows no sign of fading with time as each new generation comes to love and revere the penetrating mind and ruthless logic which were the undoing of so many Victorian master criminals.

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This volume is a reprint of the Shakespeare Head Press edition, and it presents all the plays in chronological order in which they were written. It also includes Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as well as his longer poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

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