1895 Best Seller.

Sketches of rural Scottish life based on the authors experiences as a minister in Perthshire.

1863 Best Seller.

Whitney was an opponent of women's suffrage, although in keeping with her philosophy she took no part in public life. Her message of then merely conservative values meant that her books sold very well to the parents of girls.

1881 Best Seller.

The first of a series of books about the Pepper children. The story of their impoverished lives with their widowed mother. The book was part of a fantastically popular series of 12.

1888 Best Seller.

A utopian novel. Julian West falls into an hypnotic trance near the end of the 19th Century and awakens more than 100 years later (right around now) to find America transformed into a socialist utopia. Bellamy uses the conceit to explore his ideas of how to improve society.

1895 Best Seller.

One of the most influential anti-war stories ever written The Red Badge of Courage was adapted as a film in 1951 by John Huston. Crane wanted to show what war was like and achieved a ground breaking 'psychological portrayal of fear'. The story follows an archetypical 19 year old recruit in the American Civil War.

The world's most famous gothic horror story, Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein who combines his knowledge of natural science and medieval alchemy to give life to an inanimate object. But the resultant creature is far from what he had imagined. Rejected by Frankenstein and unloved, the forsaken creature ultimately metamorphosises into a monster intent on destroying his maker and all that he holds dear.

The Odyssey is one of the two major ancient Greek epic poems of Homer. The action takes place after Homer's Iliad and details the journey home of the Greek hero Odysseus (Ulysses). The journey takes years, in part due to the Gods' disagreements over his eventual fate, and it is only when he is finally home that his troubles really begin.