Parade’s End is the great British war novel and Ford Madox Ford’s major achievement as a novelist. Originally published as four linked novels between 1924 and 1928, it follows the story of Christopher Tietjens, as his life is shattered by his wife’s infidelities and overturned by the mud, blood and destruction of the First World War. Tietjens, with his old-fashioned Tory values, is already out of step with the corrupt political culture of Edwardian England: his experiences at the Front and his developing relationship with the suffragette Valentine Wannop force him into a radical reconfiguring of his values as he participates in the post-war period of national re-construction. Parade’s End is both a subtly perceptive psychological novel and a richly descriptive chronicle of ‘the public events of a decade’. Through Tietjens, his beautiful (and unforgettably cruel) wife, Sylvia, and the principled Valentine, Ford draws us into the world of the English upper class as it goes through a period of crisis and transformation.
With this intensely moving short novel, Edith Wharton set out ‘to draw life as it really was’ in the lonely villages and desolate farms of the harsh New England mountains. Through the eyes of a visitor from the city, trapped for a winter in snowbound Starkfield, readers glimpse the hidden histories of this austere and beautiful land. Piecing together the story of monosyllabic Ethan Frome, his grim wife, Zeena, and Mattie Silver, her charming cousin, Wharton explores psychological dead-lock:frustration, longing, resentment, passion.
First published in 1911, the novella stunned its public with its consummate handling of the unfolding drama, and has remained for many readers the most compelling and subtle of all Wharton’s fiction.
Mathilda is Mary Shelley’s haunting story of an incestuous and fatal love. The narrative traces the teenaged Mathilda’s reunion with her unnamed father, and the development of their obsessive bond that culminates in suicide. Shelley’s own father, William Godwin, was so disturbed after reading the manuscript that he refused to return it to her and it remained unpublished for over one hundred years. This near-forgotten and harrowing work encompasses the Romantic themes of the individual’s growth, isolation, and the power of imagination.
Shelley’s violent and terrifying short stories share Mathilda’s fixation with feminist concerns and Gothic conventions. The murderous plots and sinister settings of these later stories reveal Shelley’s ongoing preoccupation with the
Richard Hannay finds a corpse in his flat, and becomes involved in a plot by spies to precipitate war and subvert British naval power. The resourceful victim of a manhunt, he is pursued by both the police and the ruthless conspirators.
The Thirty-Nine Steps is a seminal ‘chase’ thriller, rapid and vivid. It has been widely influential and frequently dramatised: the film directed by Alfred Hitchcock became a screen classic. This engaging novel also provides insights into the inter-action of patriotism, fear and prejudice.
Tom, a poor orphan, is employed by the villainous chimney-sweep, Grimes, to climb up inside flues to clear away the soot. While engaged in this dreadful task, he loses his way and emerges in the bedroom of Ellie, the young daughter of the house who mistakes him for a thief. He runs away, and, hot and bothered, he slips into a cooling stream, falls asleep, and becomes a Water Baby.
In his new life, he meets all sorts of aquatic creatures, including an engaging old lobster, other water babies, and at last reaches St Branden's Isle where he encounters the fierce Mrs Bedonebyeasyoudid and the motherly Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby. After a long and arduous quest to the Other-end-of-Nowhere young Tom achieves his heart's desire.
‘As a man loved a woman, that was how I loved…It was good, good, good…’
Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parents – a fencer, a horse rider and a keen scholar. Stephen grows to be a war hero, a bestselling writer and a loyal, protective lover. But Stephen is a woman, and her lovers are women. As her ambitions drive her, and society confines her, Stephen is forced into desperate actions. The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity when published in 1928. It became an international bestseller, and for decades was the single most famous lesbian novel. It has influenced how love between women is understood, for the twentieth century and beyond.
Few works of American fiction have proved as enduringly popular as Harold Bell Wright's The Shepherd of the Hills. Wright's novel, first published in 1907, was an instant best seller; by 1918 the book had sold over two million copies; the following year it was adapted for the silent screen (the first of four cinematic versions); and by the mid-1920s Wright was established as the most commercially successful American novelist of all time.
Wright's compelling and moving tale of an outsider who begins a new life in the isolated, insulated world of the fictional Mutton Hollow draws on his work as a Protestant pastor and his familiarity with the pioneer culture of homesteaders in the Ozark Mountains region of southern Missouri. The novel is both exciting and elegiac, mysterious and melodramatic.
Henry Claridge's introduction to this new Wordsworth edition provides an account of the social and historical background to Wright's novel, particularly its dramatisation of the changing world of the American frontier in the late 19th century, and an explanatory note for the modern reader to aid him or her with the idioms and speech-patterns of Ozark dialect.
This story tells of the happy discovery of the wonders of natural history by a family shipwrecked on a desert island, who remain united through all the adversities they encounter.
Inspired by Robinson Crusoe, this joyful narrative by a Swiss pastor remains a classic tale to be enjoyed by all.
The Red Badge of Courage is one of the greatest war novels of all time. It reports on the American Civil War through the eyes of Henry Fleming, an ordinary farm boy turned soldier. It evokes the chaos and the dull clatter of war: the acrid smoke, the incessant rumours of coming battles, the filth and cold, the numbing monotony, the unworldly wailing of the dying. Like an impressionist painter, Crane also captures the strange beauty of war: the brilliant red flags against a blue sky, steel bayonets flashing in the morning sun as soldiers step off into battle. In the midst of this chaotic outer world, he creates an intricate inner world as he takes us inside the head of Henry Fleming.
Stephen Crane is now recognised as one of a handful of daring innovators who helped shape modern American fiction.
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the greatest novels ever written, did not emerge from a vacuum. They were preceded by at least twenty prose works of different kinds, some of them masterpieces in their own right. These stories may be viewed as a fascinating encounter with literary predecessors such as Rousseau and Pushkin, and they are never far removed from autobiography, but in them Tolstoy can be seen forging a strong, new cultural personality. Their virtues lie in local colour, brilliant characterization and dialogue, along with strong narrative interest linked to important ideas and meanings, most of which will re-emerge in the later works.
This undervalued area of a great man’s writing deserves closer attention, and will reward the reader with unforgettable individuals, issues and situations. In The Cossacks, for example, Tolstoy succeeds in combining a realistic description of the Caucasus with his hero’s personal vision of the locality. Nor is this success the only one in this remarkable period. Reading these early stories gives a penetrating insight into the workshop of a towering literary genius.
Lucia is one of the great comic characters in English literature. Outrageously pretentious, hypocritical and snobbish, Queen Lucia, ‘as by right divine’ rules over the toy kingdom of ‘Riseholme’ based on the Cotswold village of Broadway. Her long-suffering husband Pepino is ‘her prince-consort’, the outrageously camp Georgie is her ‘gentleman-in-waiting’, the village green is her ‘parliament’, and her subjects, such as Daisy Quantock, are hapless would-be ‘Bolsheviks’. In Lucia in London, the prudish, manically ambitious Lucia launches herself into the louche world of London society. Her earnest determination to learn all about ‘modern movements’ makes her the perfect comic vehicle for Benson’s free-wheeling satire of salon society, and of the dominant fads and movements of the 1920s, including vegetarianism, yoga, palmistry, Freudianism, séances, Post-Impressionist art and Christian Science.
Meanwhile in Tilling, clearly modelled on Benson’s home town of Rye, Miss Mapp consumed by ‘chronic rage and curiosity’ sits at her window, armed with her light-opera glasses keeping baleful watch on her neighbours. ‘Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil’: and Benson transmutes her boiling into a series of small humiliations in his witty, malicious comedy.
In his insightful Introduction Keith Carabine shows that these books are excruciatingly funny because Benson, like Jane Austen, invites the reader to view the world through the self-deluded fabrications and day-dreams of Lucia and the self-deluded chronic anger and jaundiced suspicions of Elisabeth. Carabine also concentrates on the novels’ disturbing, bitchy, ‘camp’ humour whenever ‘that horrid thing which Freud calls sex’ is raised.
The flaxen-haired beauty of the childlike Lady Audley would suggest that she has no secrets. But M.E. Braddon’s classic novel of sensation uncovers the truth about its heroine in a plot involving bigamy, arson and murder.
It challenges assumptions about the nature of femininity and investigates the narrow divide between sanity and insanity, using as its focus one of the most fascinating of all Victorian heroines.
Combining elements of the detective novel, the psychological thriller and the romance of upper class life, Lady Audley’s Secret was one of the most popular and successful novels of the nineteenth century and still exerts a powerful hold on readers.
Set in Scotland in 1751, Kidnapped remains one of the most exciting stories ever written. Young David Balfour, orphaned then betrayed by his Uncle Ebenezer, his so-called guardian, falls in with Alan Breck, the unscrupulous but heroic champion of the Jacobite cause. Shipwreck, murder and dramatic escape through the Highlands are just a few of the ingredients of this highly charged tale of intrigue, action and adventure.
Catriona, the lesser-known sequel, immediately continues David's story. Back in Edinburgh, he is caught up in the aftermath of the Appin murder; certain of the accused man's innocence, David's determination to testify on his behalf is impeded by a series of adventures, not least of which is hid passionate but problematic romance with Catriona, granddaughter of Rob Roy MacGregor. Alan Breck features again, becoming involved in the thrilling attempt to reunite the lovers. One of his own favourites, Stevenson said of Catriona that he would 'never do a better book'.
In Henry IV, Part 1, the King is in a doubly ironic position. His rebellion against Richard II was successful, but now he himself is beset by rebels, led by the charismatic Harry Hotspur. The King’s son, Prince Hal, seems to be more concerned with the pleasures of the tavern world and the company of the fat rogue, Falstaff, than with concerns of state. Eventually, however, Hal proves a courageous foe of the rebels.
This history play is lively in its interplay of political intrigue and boisterous comedy, subtle in the connections between high statecraft and low craftiness, exuberant in its range of vivid characters, and memorable in its thematic concern with honour, loyalty and the quest for power.
In Henry IV, Part 2, the King is ailing, Falstaff is ageing, and the kingdom itself, where rebellion is still rife, seems diseased or debilitated. The comedy has a melancholy undertone, and the politics verge on the Machiavellian. Eventually, the resourceful Hal, inheriting the crown as Henry V, must prove that he can uphold justice in the realm. Here Shakespeare demonstrates a mastery of thematic complexity and subtlety, and shows the price in human terms that may be exacted by political success.
Une Vie (1883) and Bel-Ami (1885) seem almost diametrically opposed in tone and temper. The ‘Life’ of the first is poignantly restricted within a woman’s lot, while Bel-Ami is robustly masculine. Jeanne dreams of love. Duroy constructs a career in journalism through a string of sexual conquests, reaching political and economic success by endless intimate betrayals. The first novel conveys endurance, the next, constant activity. One is provincial and domestic in setting, tragic in form, and slow in tempo; the other, Parisian, which is to say cosmopolitan, satirical, fast and furious. Both are alive with sights, sounds, smells; but they also chart aspects of a complex history and changing culture, where political and philosophical ideas, religion, class, and gender are all under question. Exploring his world, Guy de Maupassant stretches the scope of the novel form.
From the rain forests of Almayer’s Folly to the Mediterranean coast of The Rover, Conrad’s first and final completed novels are played out against contrasting backgrounds. Almayer, in Borneo, is hopelessly obsessed by his deluded dreams for himself and his daughter, which take no account of her falling in love with a handsome Balinese prince.
Peyrol, the rover, returns to a France at war and finds the actions of those around him still overborne by memories of revolutionary terror. For the orphaned Lieutenant Réal and Arlette love offers release but their romance seems doomed by the demands of his naval duties.
Conrad’s acute understanding of human psychology and its application across racial and ideological divides is the life-force of both stories.
The Diary of a Nobody is so unassuming a work that even its author, George Grossmith, seemed unaware that he had produced a masterpiece. For more than a century this wonderfully comic portrayal of suburban life and values has remained in print, a source of delight to generations of readers, and a major literary influence, much imitated but never equalled.
If you don’t recognise yourself at some point in The Diary you are probably less than human. If you can read it without laughing aloud you have no sense of humour.
The Well-Beloved completes the cycle of Hardy's great novels, reiterating his favourite themes of man's eternal quest for perfection in both love and art, and the suffering that ensues. Jocelyn Pierston, celebrated sculptor, tries to create an image of his ideal woman - his imaginary Well-Beloved - in stone, just as he tries to find her in the flesh.
Powerful symbolism marks this romantic fantasy that Hardy has grounded firmly in reality with a characteristically authentic rendering of location, the Isle of Slingers, or Portland as we know it. Overt exploration of the relationship between erotic fascination and creativity makes this novel a nineteenth-century landmark in the persistent debate about art, aesthetics and gender.
These three wonderful comic novels drolly record the battle between Lucia and Elisabeth Mapp for social and cultural supremacy in the village of Tilling (based on Rye). Their constant skirmishes ensure that every game of bridge, tea or dinner-party, church service, council meeting or art–exhibition are thrilling encounters that ensure Tilling is always on ‘a very agreeable rack of suspense’. Both Elisabeth and Lucia are gross hypocrites, snobs and bullies, the huge differences in temperament and style ensure the battle is usually unequal. Elisabeth is incurably mean-spirited and Lucia suffers from splendid delusions of grandeur and personal prestige. Driven by demons of revenge, Elisabeth always acts impulsively, and therefore every revelation of her meanness allows Lucia, the consummate actress, to kill her ally with a sickening kindness.
This powerful novel, Tolstoy’s third major masterpiece, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, begins with a courtroom drama (the finest in Russian literature) all the more stunning for being based on a real-life event. Dmitri Nekhlyudov, called to jury service, is astonished to see in the dock, charged with murder, a young woman whom he once seduced, propelling her into prostitution. She is found guilty on a technicality, and he determines to overturn the verdict. This pitches him into a hellish labyrinth of Russian courts, prisons and bureaucracy, in which the author loses no opportunity for satire and bitter criticism of a state system (not confined to that country) of cruelty and injustice. This is Dickens for grown-ups, involving a hundred characters, Crime and Punishment brought forward half a century.
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