Scion of a well-connected but impoverished family, Frank Softly may be the most audacious, outrageous, engaging, and thoroughly love-struck young man in Regency London. By the age of 25, he's been in and out of doctoring, caricaturing, forging Old Masters, and counterfeiting half-crowns. Now a maliciously conceived will ties the loveable rascal's fortunes to those of his doddering grandmother and miserly brother-in-law. The ensuing scheme brings Frank...

Jane Austen's unfinished novel‚ The Watsons tells the story of a widowed clergyman and his two sons and four daughters. The youngest daughter, Emma, returns home after being raised by a wealthy aunt. Better-educated and more genteel than her other sisters, she looks on disapprovingly at the husband-hunting of two of her sisters, and relates better to her more responsible oldest sister, Elizabeth. Various would-be suitors appear, including the boorish...

In "Somebody's Luggage", an 1862 short story by Charles Dickens, the narrator stumbles upon some luggage left behind in the hotel where he works. Searching through it to help identify the owner, the workers find evidence of a wide variety of high-quality stories hidden away inside the luggage. When these stories are then published the mysterious author finally steps up to claim them.

A 1638 work of erotic fiction features nun-to-nun dialogues in the sexual arts "Is it right that a girl so accomplished be secluded as you are? No, no, my child, I want to share with you my most secret habits, and to give you a true notion of the deeds of a wise nun." This landmark erotic novel salaciously presents the education, one might say indoctrination, of green Catholic nun Sister Agnes at the hands of her...