Helena (Twentieth Century Classics)
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: October 25, 1990
Number of pages: 160
ISBN-13: 9780140182439
First sentence: Once, very long ago, before ever the flowers were named that struggled and fluttered below the rain-swept walls, there sat at an upper window a princess and a slave reading a story, which even then was old: or, rather, to be entirely prosaic, on the wet afternoon of the Nones of May in the year (as it was computed later) of our Lord 273, in the city of Colchester, Helena, red-haired, youngest daughter of Coel, paramount chief of the Trinovantes, gazed into the rain while her tutor read the Iliad of Homer in a Latin paraphrase.