Revealing the truths and realities about Irish society in the early 20th century, Joyce’s Dubliners challenged the prevailing image of Dublin at the time. A group portrait made up of 15 short stories about the inhabitants of Joyce’s native city, he offers a subtle critique of his own town, imbuing the text with an underlying tone of tragedy. Through his various characters he displays the complicated relationships, hardships and mundane details of everyday life and the desire for escape – a yearning that so closely mirrored his own experiences.

Joyce’s classic depiction of Stephen Dedalus’s boyhood and coming of age in Ireland at the turn of the century, his childhood, sexual awakening, intellectual development and revolt against Catholicism, remains one of the key works of modern literature.

George Eliot was the pseudonym for Mary Anne Evans, one of the leading writers of the Victorian era, who published seven major novels and several translations during her career. She started her career as a sub-editor for the left-wing journal The Westminster Review, contributing politically charged essays and reviews before turning her attention to novels. Among Eliot’s best-known works are Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, in which she explores aspects of human psychology, focusing on the rural outsider and the politics of small-town life. Eliot died in 1880.

Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was an American author of short stories and novels for both adults and children. She is now considered by many to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century.

The Great Gatsby is considered F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus, exploring themes of decadence, idealism, social stigmas, patriarchal norms, and the deleterious effects of unencumbered wealth in capitalistic society, set against the backdrop of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties. At its heart, it’s a cautionary tale, a revealing look into the darker side to the American Dream.

The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s twelfth novel, initially serialized in four parts in the Pictorial Review magazine in 1920, and later released by D. Appleton and Company as a book in New York and in London. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making it the first novel written by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and thus Wharton the first woman to win the prize.The story is set in upper-class New York City in the 1870s.