Abigail, a successful cookbook author, hires a new housekeeper, Lila, whose mother once had Abigail's mother as a housekeeper.

Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking,...

By turns lyrical and dramatic, hilarious and heartbreaking, The Sound and the Fury is the tragic story of beautiful Caddy Compson and the dissolution of her family.

Housekeeper Santina becomes deeply enmeshed within the family she works for while she navigates her feelings for her employer and hides secrets that could shatter the home.

Captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India as witnessed through the lives of two women--Sera Dubash, an upper middle-class housewife, and Bhima, an illiterate domestic hardened by a life of loss and despair.

Class distinction is the common theme: between masters and servants in an Irish castle, owners and workers in a foundry, and the wealthy and working class in a railway station.