William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Emile Zola: trans. Charles Duff

Mary Wollstonecraft William Godwin

P.G.Woodhouse

Mary Wollstonecraft Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Jules Verne Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) relates the hair-raising journey made as a wager by the Victorian gentleman Phileas Fogg, who succeeds - but only just! - in circling the globe within eighty days. The dour Fogg's obsession with his timetable is complemented by the dynamism and versatility of his French manservant, Passepartout, whose talent for getting into scrapes brings colour and suspense to the race against time. Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) was Verne's first novel. It documents an apocryphal jaunt across the continent of Africa in a hydrogen balloon designed by the omniscient, imperturbable and ever capable Dr Fergusson, the prototype of the Vernian adventurer.

Jules Verne Jules Verne's third science fiction novel describes the discovery and exploration of a secret tunnel which leads through a volcano to the centre of the Earth. The leader of the expedition, together with his ward and joined by his nephew and an Icelandic guide commence the journey.

Voltaire

Horace Walpole

Mrs. Humphry Ward

Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh

H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton

Dorothy Vernon White

Kate Douglas Wiggin

Oscar Wilde A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife", Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."

As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment."

OSCAR WILDE

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde, John Wyse Jackson This collection of writings comes from the neglected period of Oscar Wilde's output, before the great plays, when he was contributing for journals and editor of The Woman's World. Read together, these pieces illuminate the author's mode of life and thought, and that of his age.

Eliza Winstanley

P.G. Wodehouse

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mrs. Henry Wood

Mrs. Henry Wood

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

Cheng'en Wu

W.B. Yeats