Genre Other. Page - 273

Description

Framley Parsonage is the fourth novel in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire series. Originally a serial, it was first published as a book in 1861, and it has since been praised for its unsentimental depiction of the lives of middle-class people in the mid-Victorian era.

As with the other books in the series, Framley Parsonage is set in the fictious English county of Barsetshire, and deals with the doings of a variety of families and characters who live in the region, several of whom have appeared in the previous books; but it primarily concerns the young Reverend Mark Robarts.

Robarts has been appointed as vicar of the parish of Framley through the patronage of Lady Lufton of Framley Court, the mother of his long-time friend Ludovic, now Lord Lufton. After he and his wife Fanny take up residence in Framley Parsonage, Robarts is led into the society of some loose-living aristocrats through his friendship with Ludovic. Robarts eventually finds himself weakly consenting to his name being included on a bill for a loan to one of his new connections, Sowerby. By so doing, he becomes liable for debts he cannot possibly satisfy.

An important secondary thread involves Mark Robarts’ sister Lucy, who after their father’s death comes to live with her brother’s family at the parsonage. Through them, she becomes acquainted with Lady Lufton and her son Ludovic, and romantic complications ensue.

Framley Parsonage was originally published anonymously in serial form in Cornhill Magazine, and such was its popularity that during its publication a hysterical young woman apparently tried to gain notoriety in her country town by claiming to be its author. “The real writer,” we are told, “dealt very gently with the pretender.”

Description

Roger Gale, a media-monitoring business owner nearing retirement, observes life in early 20th century New York City through the eyes of his three daughters. The youngest, Laura, is a social butterfly always going to the latest excitements the city can offer. The middle, Edith, is a mother to four children, on whom she dotes. The oldest, Deborah, cares for her own “family,” tenement children and the poor trying to make it the new country they have made their home. Through each daughter, he sees the changing social order of New York in a new way.

Description

“Bunny” Manders is drawn to fill the void left by A. J. Raffles’ absence at the end of The Black Mask with untold stories of the past adventures. These tales are perhaps ones that Bunny is most ashamed of, but among the regrets lie threads of future happiness.

The public popularity of Raffles, fuelled by stage and film adaptations in the intervening years, lead to this continuation of his saga in 1905. A Thief in the Night, with the exception of the last two stories, is set in the same period as the events of The Amateur Cracksman.

Description

Growth of the Soil was published in 1917 to universal acclaim. A mid- to late-career work for Hamsun, it was celebrated for its then-revolutionary use of literary techniques like stream of consciousness, and for its unadorned depiction of pastoral life. Its focus on the quotidian lives of everyday people has led scholars to classify it as a novel of Norwegian New Realism.

Isak, a man so strong and so simple that he echoes a primitive, foundational “everyman,” finds an empty plot of land in turn-of-the-century Norway, and builds a small home. He soon attracts a wife, Inger, whose harelip has led her to be ostracized from town life but who is nonetheless a hard and conscientious worker. Together the two earthy beings build a farm and a family, and watch as society and civilization grows and develops around them.

Isak and Inger’s toils sometimes bring them up against the burgeoning modernity around them, but curiously, the novel is not one driven by a traditional conflict-oriented plot. Instead, the steady progression of life on the farm, with its ups and downs, its trials and joys, makes the people and their growth the novel’s main propellant. While the humble, homespun protagonists occasionally come into conflict with the awe-inspiring forces of civilization, more often than not, those forces are portrayed as positive and symbiotic companions to the agrarian lifestyle.

Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920 for Growth of the Soil, one of the rare instances in which the Nobel committee awarded a prize for a specific novel, and not a body of work. It has since come to be regarded as a classic of modernist, and Norwegian, literature.

Description

A middle-aged man named Lambert Strether is sent to Paris by his wealthy wife-to-be in order to convince her son Chad to return home to America and take over the lucrative family business. This turns out to be much easier said than done, as Strether finds Chad much better adapted to European life than anyone expected.

James’ characteristically dense prose is matched by a cast of subtly-realized characters who rarely say exactly what they mean. Widely regarded as one of James’ best novels, The Ambassadors explores themes of love, duty, and aging, all told through the eyes of a man who wonders if life hasn’t passed him by.

This ebook follows the 1909 New York Edition, with one important exception: Since 1950, it has been generally agreed that the New York Edition had incorrectly ordered the first two chapters of Book XI. This text follows the convention of most printings since then, and the chapters have been returned to what is believed to have been James’ intended order.

Description

After the events of The Amateur Cracksman A. J. Raffles is missing, presumed dead, and “Bunny” Manders is destitute but free after a stretch in prison for his crimes. So when a mysterious telegraph arrives suggesting the possibility of a lucrative position, Bunny has little option but to attend the given address.

Raffles was a commercial success for E. W. Hornung, garnering critical praise but also warnings about the glorification of crime. The Black Mask, published two years after his first collection of Raffles stories, takes a markedly more downcast tone, with the high-life escapades of the earlier stories curtailed by Raffles’ purported death.

Description

A biting satire of late 19th-century American imperialism, Captain Jinks, Hero was written by the American pacifist Ernest Howard Crosby. Crosby, who corresponded with Leo Tolstoy and advocated Tolstoy’s pacifist ideals in the United States, lambasts the American military and its involvement in the Spanish-American War and the Boxer Rebellion through the character of Captain Jinks, a jingoistic officer who embarks on a tragicomic quest to become a “perfect soldier.” The novel also satirizes the role of industrial and media interests in promoting war through the character of Jinks’s friend and companion Cleary, a yellow journalist who feeds sensational stories back to the home front at the behest of editors and monopolists.

Description

All’s Well That Ends Well was not popular during Shakespeare’s time, and is still considered to be a play without renown even today. It’s also one of the three “problem plays,” in that it deals with controversial social issues. Although it remains unloved by the public, productions have featured star-studded casts, including actresses like Dame Judi Dench and Claudie Blakley.

Helena, daughter of a skilled doctor and adopted child of the Countess of Rousillon, is in love with Bertram, the Countess’s son. Helena cures the King of France and is rewarded with a husband of her choice, so she selects Bertram. He contests the legitimacy of their marriage, and insists on demanding that she complete two tasks before he can consider their marriage legitimate: She must wear his family ring, and provide him an heir.

This Standard Ebooks production is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Description

A. J. Raffles and his friend “Bunny” Manders are the quintessential rich young socialites; but behind the high-living façade, they’ve exhausted their funds. There’s only one way to pay the bills: a secret double-life as criminals.

Raffles was E. W. Hornung’s biggest literary success, with the Raffles stories proving perennially popular. This volume was dedicated to his brother-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle, and in Raffles and Manders there is a clear relation to Holmes and Watson. The character’s popularity helped kickstart the “gentleman thief” genre, and it’s easy to see parallels to the later stories of Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc.

Description

Caroline Meeber, known as Sister Carrie to her family, moves to Chicago at the tender age of eighteen to try to make something of herself. Living with her sister and brother-in-law, she quickly finds that life, and work, are hard in the big city. She soon takes up with a traveling salesman she met on the train into town. Months later her eye is turned by one of the salesman’s acquaintances, George Hurstwood, and vice-versa. A series of events lead Carrie and Hurstwood to New York City, where both struggle to live out the aspirations that brought them there.

Theodore Dreiser was one of the earliest naturalist writers, but he wrote Sister Carrie while the United States was still very Victorian in its morals. The book therefore caused a stir from the beginning: Carrie Meeber was clearly, even in the disguised language of the time, a sexually active, unmarried female, who wasn’t made to suffer for her indiscretion to the extent considered necessary at the time. Dreiser’s depiction of rough language merely added to the controversy. The first printing sold only 456 copies in two years; it was to be another five years before Dreiser could convince another publisher to carry the book. Today it’s considered a classic and one of the “greatest of all American urban novels.”

The text of Sister Carrie was unchanged until 1981, when the University of Pennsylvania Press published a new version with 36,000 words restored. The edition was not without controversy: the cuts were originally made before the first printing at the suggestion of Dreiser’s wife, or his friend Arthur Henry, and Dreiser had approved all of them. Although the new Pennsylvania Edition, as it is called, made a good case for restoring the changes, it is the 1907 text that remains the most widely available today, and it is that text in this edition.