Every work,
annotated.
You get the whole passage, in its own words, plus a note in the margin that explains what it's doing. Nothing is abridged.
See which of these became films →Pride and Prejudice — Opening
Jane Austen · 1813
One ironic sentence that dismantles an entire marriage market.
The Canterbury Tales — General Prologue
Geoffrey Chaucer · c. 1387
Thirty pilgrims, one storytelling contest, and a poet pretending to be naive.
Jane Eyre — Opening
Charlotte Brontë · 1847
A plain, poor governess who says exactly what she thinks.
The Rape of the Lock
Alexander Pope · 1712
An epic about a stolen curl of hair, which is the entire point.
My Last Duchess
Robert Browning · 1842
A monologue in which the speaker condemns himself while being perfectly polite.
Dracula
Bram Stoker · 1897
Letters, diaries and telegrams closing in on one undead count.
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy · 1878
One affair, one marriage, and a society that grants forgiveness unevenly.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 1891
A country girl destroyed by other people's definitions of purity.
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen · 1811
Two sisters: one feels everything, one shows nothing, both must survive on very little.
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott · 1868
Four sisters growing up while the money runs out.
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy · 1874
A woman inherits a farm and three very different kinds of love.
Villette
Charlotte Brontë · 1853
A plain, brilliant, furious woman makes a life on her own terms.
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1850
A letter of shame becomes the only honest thing in the town.
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood · 1985
A theocracy that renames women after the men who own them.
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 1963
A brilliant student watches her own mind become the weather.
The Color Purple
Alice Walker · 1982
Letters to God, then letters to a sister, and a self assembling in between.
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys · 1966
The first Mrs Rochester gets to tell it herself.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini · 2007
Two women in Kabul, three decades, one house.
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman · 1892
A woman is prescribed rest in a room and starts reading the wallpaper.
Carmilla
Sheridan Le Fanu · 1872
A guest stays at a lonely house and grows tired, and pale, and affectionate.
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe · 1794
A castle, a heroine, and a great deal of unexplained terror.