William Crimsworth escapes a dreary clerkship in industrial Yorkshire by taking a job as a teacher in Belgium. There, however, his entanglement with the sensuous but manipulative Zoraide Reuter complicates his affections for a penniless girl who is both teacher and pupil in Reuter's school. Also included in this edition is Emma, Charlotte Bronte's last, unfinished novel. Both works are drawn from the original Clarendon texts.

Set in Coketown, a fictional industrial town in the north of England, Hard Times was born of its author's indignation at the soul-crushing conditions of the industrial age, and yet it vibrantly transcends the stock situations and polemical weaknesses typical of social protest fiction of the time. The indelible characters-Mr. Gradgrind, whose utilitarian educational philosophy emotionally cripples his own children; the hypocritical factory owner Josiah...

Eighteen-year-old Sam resents the effects of the Vietnam War, especially the death of her father and her uncle's suffering from Agent Orange ingestion.

Thirty-four stories deal with a widow visiting Russia, a tour guide in Egypt, and the stresses of modern life.