"Here is the only available paperback edition of George Moore's powerful novel, Esther Waters. Controversial and influential on its first appearance in 1894, the book opened up a new direction for the English realist tradition. Unflinching in its depiction of the dark and sordid side of Victorian culture, it remains one of the great novels of London life and labor in the 1890s. The novel depicts with extraordinary candor Esther's struggles against...

Mrs. Harris is a salt-of-the-earth London charlady who cheerfully cleans the houses of the rich. One day, while tidying Lady Dant's wardrobe, she comes across the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life--a Dior dress. In all the years of her drab and humble existence, she's never seen anything as magical as the dress before her and she's never wanted anything so badly. Determined to make her dream come true, Mrs. Harris scrimps and saves...

Novel by Theodore Dreiser, published in 1911. It exemplifies the naturalism of which Dreiser was a proponent, telling the unhappy story of a working-class woman who accepts all the adversity life visits on her and becomes the mistress of two wealthy and powerful men in order to help her impoverished family. --The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature.

Grace Bradley went to work at Riverton House as a servant when she was just a girl, before the First World War. For years her life was inextricably tied up with the Hartford family, most particularly the two daughters, Hannah and Emmeline. In the summer of 1924, at a glittering society party held at the house, a young poet shot himself. The only witnesses were Hannah and Emmeline and only they--and Grace--know the truth. In 1999, when Grace is ninety-eight...

Forced to give up her baby for adoption after the death of her husband in 1908, an Irish teen takes a maid's job at a sprawling New England estate before a mysterious death reveals a five-generation secret. 1908. After her sweetheart dies of fever during the crossing from Ireland, sixteen-year-old Bridey gives up their baby for adoption. She takes a position as maid for the Hollingsworth family, caring for the children as if they were her own. Over...

"When a young married couple hire a middle-aged widow during the wife, Nora's, difficult pregnancy, they don't realize the dominating force she will become in their small family. Signora A--maid, nanny, and confidante--becomes the glue in their household, and over time, the steady and loving presence whose benign influence allows them to negotiate the complexities of married life. But the delicate fabric of the young family comes undone when Signora...

He is a brilliant math professor, with a peculiar problem--since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only 80 minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young housekeeper with a 10-year-old son who is hired to care for the professor. Between them, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms.

"Reimagines the private life of Emily Dickinson, one of America's most beloved poets, through her own voice and through the eyes of her family's Irish maid"--

In 1929, Alma DeGeer Dunahew, the maid for a prominent family in Missouri, chases down justice after her younger sister is one of forty-two people killed in a mysterious explosion at a local dance hall.

Maddie Chester is determined to leave Gansett Island, but when Mac McCarthy hits her with his car, seriously injuring her, and moves in to take care of her and her young son while she recovers, their newfound love gives them both a reason to stay.