Gaskell’s last novel, widely considered her masterpiece, follows the fortunes of two families in nineteenth century rural England. At its core are family relationships – father, daughter and step-mother, father and sons, father and step-daughter – all tested and strained by the romantic entanglements that ensue.
Despite its underlying seriousness, the prevailing tone is one of comedy. Gaskell vividly portrays the world of the late 1820s and the forces of change within it, and her vision is always humane and progressive.
The story is full of acute observation and sympathetic character-study: the feudal squire clinging to old values, his naturalist son welcoming the new world of science, the local doctor and his scheming second wife, the two girls brought together by their parent’s marriage…
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the most important and innovative figures of the European Middle Ages. Writing his Comedy (the epithet Divine was added by later admirers) in exile from his native Florence, he aimed to address a world gone astray both morally and politically. At the same time, he sought to push back the restrictive rules which traditionally governed writing in the Italian vernacular, to produce a radically new and all-encompassing work.
The Comedy tells of the journey of a character who is at one and the same time both Dante himself and Everyman through the three realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. He presents a vision of the afterlife which is strikingly original in its conception, with a complex architecture and a coherent structure. On this journey Dante's protagonist - and his reader - meet characters who are variously noble, grotesque, beguiling, fearful, ridiculous, admirable, horrific and tender, and through them he is shown the consequences of sin, repentance and virtue, as he learns to avoid Hell and, through cleansing in Purgatory, to taste the joys of Heaven.
Henry James's last completed novel, The Golden Bowl, is the story of two flawed marriages. The lives and relationships of Maggie Verver and her widowed American millionaire father, Adam, are changed and challenged by the beautiful and charming Charlotte Stant, who is the former lover of Maggie's husband, the impoverished Italian, Prince Amerigo.
The narrative is underpinned by complex symbolism. The gilded crystal bowl with its almost invisible flaw is the vehicle which James uses to reveal past misdemeanours and make his characters face their own defects in this classic tale of redemption.
Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most popular, influential and controversial book written by an American. Stowe's rich, panoramic novel passionately dramatises why the whole of America is implicated in and responsible for the sin of slavery, and resoundingly concludes that only ‘repentance, justice and mercy’ will prevent the onset of ‘the wrath of Almighty God!’.
The novel gave such a terrific impetus to the crusade for the abolition of slavery that President Lincoln half-jokingly greeted Stowe as‘the little lady’ who started the great Civil War. As Keith Carabine argues in his lively and provocative Introduction, the novel immediately provoked a storm of competing and contradictory responses among Northern and Southern readers, moderate and radical abolitionist groups, blacks and women, with regard to issues of form, genre, politics, religion, race and gender, that are still of great interest because they anticipate the concerns that vex and divide modern readers and critical constituencies.
"War and Peace" is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy's philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery.
This translation is one which received Tolstoy's approval.
The child of parents who divorce, remarry and then embark on adulterous affairs, Maisie Farange survives by her intelligence and spirit. For all its sombre theme of childhood innocence exposed to a corrupted adult world, this novel is one of James's comic masterpieces. The outrageous behaviour of the characters on the seedy fringes of the English upper class is conveyed with wit and relish. The dual perspective of a sophisticated narrator richly appreciative of the absurdities of the adult sexual merry-go-round and the candid vision of Maisie, 'rebounding' from one parent to another like a 'shuttlecock', together create an 'associational magic'.
Strangely, unexpectedly, from so much that is tawdry, comes a tale of moral energy and subtlety. James's foresight was in understanding the modernity of his subject, which is even more relevant today in the twenty-first century.
First published in 1920, D. H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love” is the sequel to his 1915 novel “The Rainbow” and is widely considered one of his best works and one of the most important English novels of the twentieth century. “Women in Love” continues to follow the Brangwen family, focusing on the lives and loves of sisters Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen. Living in the Midlands of England during the 1910’s, Ursula is a teacher and Gudrun is an artist. The sisters meet two men who live nearby, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, the four find that they have much in common and the sisters soon get involved with them romantically. Rupert and Ursula are at first friends, but develop a loving relationship and eventually become engaged. Gudrun pursues a romantic relationship with Gerald, a local industrialist, but their romance is stormy and tumultuous and ultimately ends in tragedy. Controversial during its time for its frank depictions of sexuality and the destructiveness of relationships and jealousy, “Women in Love” is a modern and powerful story of love and human imperfections set against the backdrop of the social turmoil of the First World War. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.
Lawrence's finest, most mature novel initially met with disgust and incomprehension. In the love affairs of two sisters, Ursula with Rupert, and Gudrun with Gerald, critics could only see a sorry tale of sexual depravity and philosophical obscurity. Women in Love is, however, a profound response to a whole cultural crisis. The 'progress' of the modern industrialised world had led to the carnage of the First World War. What, then, did it mean to call ourselves 'human'? On what grounds could we place ourselves above and beyond the animal world? What are the definitive forms of our relationships - love, marriage, family, friendship - really worth? And how might they be otherwise? Without directly referring to the war, Women in Love explores these questions with restless energy. As a sequel to The Rainbow, the novel develops experimental techniques which made Lawrence one of the most important writers of the Modernist movement.
Following on from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884-5) Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) became one of Mark Twain's most popular books. Again we meet his world famous characters: Tom Sawyer, 'Nigger Jim', and Huck Finn - together now on a fantastical balloon journey across the Atlantic to meet lions and Bedouins in the Sahara and retrace something of Twain's own expedition to the Holy Land in his best-selling The Innocents Abroad (1869).
Later, in Tom Sawyer Detective (1896), Twain returns us the banks of the Mississippi and a murder mystery involving identical twins and stolen diamonds. The author is back in his formative territory, the region his imagination could never leave behind. It provides him with another comedy of human foibles starring the irrepressible Tom Sawyer.
The Turn of the Screw is the classic ghost story for which James is most remembered. Set in a country house, it is a chilling tale of the supernatural told by a master of the genre.
The Aspern Papers is a tale of Americans in Europe, a theme in which Henry James is at his most assured and accomplished. The author cleverly evokes the drama of comédie humaine against the settings of a Venetian palace.
Professor Aronnax, his faithful servant, Conseil, and the Canadian harpooner, Ned Land, begin an extremely hazardous voyage to rid the seas of a little-known and terrifying sea monster. However, the "monster" turns out to be a giant submarine, commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo, by whom they are soon held captive.
So begins not only one of the great adventure classics by Jules Verne, the 'Father of Science Fiction', but also a truly fantastic voyage from the lost city of Atlantis to the South Pole.
There are four of them - George, Harris, the writer himself and that dog, Montmorency - all participants in a boating expedition on the Thames. The difficulties and vicissitudes heaped upon these innocents develop to epic proportions as they experience the hazards of the great English waterway. Their problems are in no way diminished by the outrageous behaviour of Montmorency,who lays waste to several riverside communities in the course of their journey.
‘What is a “bummel”?’ said George. ‘How would you translate it?’ ‘A “bummel”,’ I explained, ‘I should describe as a journey, long or short, without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started…’
After considerable indecision the bummel takes our heroes to Germany's Black Forest where they manage to disrupt the tranquil way of life usually enjoyed by the denizens, whose curious behaviour they closely observe and record in their account of this second epic journey. Even without that dog, chaos and mayhem reign supreme.
This book is with an introduction and notes by Dr Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading. "To the Lighthouse" is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels.
It is based on her own early experiences, and while it touches on childhood and children's perceptions and desires, it is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships, marriage and the changing class-structure in the period spanning
When people use the adjective 'Kafkaesque', it is The Trial they have in mind - the nightmarish world of Joseph K., where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials, and any help there may be comes from unexpected sources.
K. is never told what he is on trial for, and when he says he is innocent, he is immediately asked 'innocent of what?' Is he perhaps on trial for his innocence? Could he have freed himself from the proceedings by confessing his guilt as a human being? Has the trial been set up because he is incapable of admitting his guilt, and hence his humanity?
The Trial is a chilling and at the same time blackly amusing tale that maintains, to the very end, a constant, relentless atmosphere of disorientation and quirkiness. Superficially the subject-matter is bureaucracy, but the story's great strength is its description of the effect on the life and mind of Josef K. It is in the last resort a description of the absurdity of 'normal' human nature.
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Classics
The Waves
Virginia Woolf
Introduction and Notes by Deborah Parsons, University of Birmingham.
'I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot', Virginia Woolf stated of her eighth novel, The Waves. Widely regarded as one of her greatest and most original works, it conveys the rhythms of life in synchrony with the cycle of nature and the passage of time. Six children - Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis - meet in a garden close to the sea, their voices sounding over the constant echo of the waves that roll back and forth from the shore.
The subsequent continuity of these six main characters, as they develop from childhood to maturity and follow different passions and ambitions, is interspersed with interludes from the timeless and unifying chorus of nature. In pure stream-of-consciousness style, Woolf presents a cross-section of multiple yet parallel lives, each marked by the disintegrating force of a mutual tragedy.
The Waves is her searching exploration of individual and collective identity, and the observations and emotions of life, from the simplicity and surging optimism of youth to the vacancy and despair of middle-age.
Far from fading with time, Kenneth Grahame's classic tale of fantasy has attracted a growing audience in each generation. Rat, Mole, Badger and the preposterous Mr Toad (with his 'Poop-poop-poop' road-hogging new motor car), have brought delight to many through the years with their odd adventures on and by the river, and at the imposing residence of Toad Hall.
With an Introduction and Notes by David Ellis, University of Kent at Canterbury. With Illustrations by R.Seymour, R.W. Buss and Hablot K. Browne (Phiz).
The Pickwick Papers is Dickens' first novel and widely regarded as one of the major classics of comic writing in English. Originally serialised in monthly instalments, it quickly became a huge popular success with sales reaching 40,000 by the final part.
In the century and a half since its first appearance, the characters of Mr Pickwick, Sam Weller and the whole of the Pickwickian crew have entered the consciousness of all who love English literature in general, and the works of Dickens in particular.
After Sherlock Holmes' apparently fatal encounter with the sinister Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, the great detective reappears, to the delight of the faithful Dr Watson in The Adventures of the Empty House.
The stories are illustrated by Sidney Paget, the finest of illustrators, from which our images of Sherlock Holmes and his world derive.
This is the second of three volumes of The Complete Sherlock Holmes newly typeset from the original copies of The Strand Magazine The three books present all the Holmes stories in order of first publication.
Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town...a cruel devourer of the world's light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.'
Conrad’s ‘monstrous town’ is London, and his story of espionage and counter-espionage, anarchists and embassies, is a detective story that becomes the story of Winnie Verloc’s tenacity in maintaining her devotion to her peculiar and simple-minded brother, Stevie, as they pursue their very ordinary lives above a rather dubious shop in the back streets of Soho. However, far from offering any sentimental picture, The Secret Agent is Conrad’s funniest novel. Its savagely witty picture of human absurdity and misunderstanding is written in an ironic style that provokes laughter and unease at the same time, and that continues to provide one of the most disturbing visions of aspiration and futility in twentieth century literature.
Mary Lennox was horrid. Selfish and spoilt, she was sent to stay with her hunchback uncle in Yorkshire. She hated it. But when she finds the way into a secret garden and begins to tend it, a change comes over her and her life. She meets and befriends a local boy, the talented Dickon, and comes across her sickly cousin Colin who had been kept hidden from her. Between them, the three children work astonishing magic in themselves and those around them.
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