Frederick Davidson

Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) is a novel by English author E.M. Forster. The work was Forster's first novel, and its success helped launch his lengthy and critically acclaimed career as a writer of literary fiction. Where Angels Fear to Tread, the title is drawn from Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism (1711), is a moving meditation on class, gender, social convention, and the grieving process. Following the death of her husband, a widow named...

First published in 1819, "Don Juan" is often acknowledged as one of Lord Byron's greatest poetic works. An epic poem, comprised of seventeen cantos that Byron continued to work on and expand until his death, "Don Juan" follows the adventures of the famous Spanish libertine and reflects upon many of the romantic and personal experiences that are universal to all mankind. From a forbidden love affair in Spain, to exile in Italy, from being shipwrecked...

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted "Germinal! Germinal!" While it is a dramatic novel of working life and everyday relationships, Germinal is also a complex novel of ideas, given fresh vigor and power...

Originally published in Polish in 1896 by Nobel Prize-winning author Henryk Sienkiewicz, "Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero" is the story of a love that develops in Rome between a young Christian woman, Lygia, and Marcus Vinicius, a Roman patrician, during the reign of Nero in 64 AD. The title "Quo Vadis" is translated from Latin as "Where are you going?" The quote is a reference to the New Testament verse John 13:36, which states "Simon...

Samuel Butler was an individualistic Victorian era writer who published a variety of works. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, considerable studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history as well as criticism. Butler even made prose translations of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" which remain some of the most popular to this day. His authority on literature came through his posthumous novel, "The...

Featuring ten works of comedic short fiction, P.G Wodehouse's The Clicking of Cuthbert is comprised of stories about golfers that teach a lesson is an odd and amusing way. In A Woman is Only a Woman, the friendship between two men is threatened when they both fall in love with the same woman. Since she claims to like them equally, the two men decide to challenge each other to a game of golf, agreeing that the best golfer gets the woman's hand in marriage....

Sally Nicholas is a pretty and popular American woman working as dance partner for hire. Orphaned, she and her brother, Fillmore, has been on their own for years. However, on Sally's twenty-first birthday, her life is changed when she learns that she and her brother have inherited a fortune, which they now have access to. Fillmore, who is overly ambitious, and impulsive intends on investing his money in schemes that promise fast wealth, in hopes to...

Love, anarchy, and silly plots are the order of the day at when the daughter of an earl is pursued by an American songwriter

Arthur Conan Doyle's His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes(1917) is an outstanding collection of some of the later stories and most dramatic exploits of Detective Holmes and Dr. Watson. These stories were composed between 1908 and 1917, with the exception of the infamous tale "The Cardboard Box", which was written in 1893. Six of these adventures were initially published The Strand magazine, and the final titular story was published...

In a collection of ten short stories, Jeeves the butler is in charge and is always right, and when Bertie Wooster and his friends get in trouble, he's always there to help