Genre Other. Page - 287

Description

Robert Frost published New Hampshire, his fourth book of poetry, in 1923. The centerpiece is the long poem “New Hampshire,” an ode to the state. Endnotes on its lines point to shorter poems in the “Notes” section, and the book is capped with “Grace Notes,” a series of short lyrics—some of which are among Frost’s most famous works. The poems are each a meditative brushstroke of Americana, presented in Frost’s trademark plain-spoken but carefully-considered verse. The collection went on to win the 1924 Pulitzer prize for poetry, the first of four Frost would go on to receive.

Included in this book is “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fire and Ice,” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Description

Though mostly known for his plays, Shakespeare also published poetry during his writing career. From 1592 to 1593, an outbreak of the bubonic plague swept through England, killing almost 20,000 people. In January 1593 city officials ordered the theaters in London to shut their doors, and work for the famous playwright and actor came to a halt. Shakespeare turned to writing poetry to make ends meet during the closures. While the plague hindered his work in theaters, it provided source material for some of his most famous plays.

He first published “Venus and Adonis” in 1593, followed by “The Rape of Lucrece” in 1594. While both narrative poems contain sexual themes, their views on love versus lust are in stark contrast. After the theaters reopened, Shakespeare continued to write poetry and went on to publish “The Passionate Pilgrim” and “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” The last of his poems were published in his 1609 quarto, containing 154 sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint.” The sonnets cover an array of themes: different types of romantic love, real beauty versus clichéd beauty, and the responsibilities of being beautiful.

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

Description

Michael Fane arrives in the thin red house in Carlington Road to his new family of Nurse, Cook, Annie the housemaid, his younger sister Stella, and the occasional presence of Mother. From here, the novel follows the next twenty years of his life as he tries to find his place in the upper echelons of Edwardian society, through prep school, studies at Oxford, and his emergence into the wide world. The setting is rich in period detail, and the characters portrayed are vivid and more nuanced in their actions and stories than first impressions imply.

Sinister Street was an immediate critical success on publication, although not without some worry for its openness to discuss less salubrious scenes, and it was a favourite of George Orwell and John Betjeman. Compton Mackenzie had attended both St. James’ school and St. Mary’s College at Oxford and the novel is at least partly autobiographical, but for the same measure was praised as an accurate portrayal of that experience; Max Beerbohm said “There is no book on Oxford like it. It gives you the actual Oxford experience.” Although originally published in two volumes (in 1913 and 1914) for commercial reasons, the two form a single novel and have been brought back together again for this edition.

Description

In 1839, Thoreau and his brother took a small boat upriver and back. Some years later, while in his cabin at Walden Pond, he gathered his notes from that journey and other writings from his journals, and composed this, his first book.

Like the rivers it describes, the book meanders through varying territories and climates. He writes of the natural surroundings they encounter and of the history of the region, but also takes long and remarkable detours through topics like friendship, history, a comparison of Christianity and Hinduism, Vedic literature, government and conscience, Thoreau’s philosophy of literature, monuments and graveyards, poetry (in particular Ossian, Chaucer, and certain minor Greek poets), and the satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus. Thoreau also includes several poems of his own.

Thoreau had the first edition of this book published at his own expense, and at first it struggled to find an audience. “I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes,” he remarked at one point, “over 700 of which I wrote myself.”

Description

The Night Land is science fiction ahead of its time. Published in 1912, the book introduces a 17th-century gentleman who loses his wife. He soon discovers himself somehow reanimated in Earth’s far future, millions of years from now, when the sun has died and the Earth has become a hellish waste. What remains of humanity lives in titanic mile-high pyramids surrounded by energy shields to protect them from the abhuman monsters lurking in the darkness.

The human survivors soon receive a distress signal sent by a long-forgotten lesser pyramid, and the narrator embarks on a bloody quest to rescue the maiden of the pyramid—which he knows to be his lost love, somehow transcending time and space. On his journey the narrator is beset by countless horrifying monsters, many of them mutated former-humans. These depictions are so singular that H. P. Lovecraft called The Night Land “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written.”

The novel is unique in its farsighted depiction of technology. The narrator has telepathic powers and is able to communicate with others over long distances. These powers are enabled by his “brain elements,” which are possibly surgically-implanted. Telepathic communications may be spied upon by the monsters of the waste, but a “master word” sent by the caller may verify the integrity of the signal—a description of a kind of early public-key cryptography.

The narrator survives on food pellets and “powdered water,” predicting a kind of astronaut food. His weapon of choice is a Diskos, a kind of whirling razor-sharp blade that shoots fire and energy. The machines and force fields of the human pyramid monument are powered by “Earth current,” which the narrator worries is slowly becoming dimmer over the years. The pyramid itself is a jewel of imagination: described as miles wide and miles high, each layer is its own city, and it continues deep underground where artificial grow chambers provide food for millions of humans.

Though the novel maintains a sort of legendary status for its grim and imaginative depiction of a monstrous future world, critics acknowledge the work as a flawed masterpiece. The narrative is written in a highly affected style, perhaps meant to emulate 17th century speech, or perhaps meant to be a stylized form of speech used by far-future humans. In any case, it resembles no real style of English, past or present. While some critics praise this style as uniquely atmospheric, others point to it, along with the lack of dialog or proper names, as some of the book’s more difficult aspects. Critics also frequently cite the book’s highly repetitious nature, simplistic characterization, and inordinate length—nearly 200,000 words—as major flaws. But despite whatever flaws the novel may have, the awesome vision of The Night Land remains a marvel to behold.

Description

Shirley, published in 1849, was Charlotte Brontë’s second novel after Jane Eyre. Published under her pseudonym of “Currer Bell,” it differs in several respects from that earlier work. It is written in the third person with an omniscient narrator, rather than the first-person of Jane Eyre, and incorporates the themes of industrial change and the plight of unemployed workers. It also features strong pleas for the recognition of women’s intellect and right to their independence of thought and action.

Set in the West Riding of Yorkshire during the Napoleonic period of the early 19th Century, the novel describes the confrontations between textile manufacturers and organized groups of workers protesting the introduction of mechanical looms. Three characters stand out: Robert Moore, a mill-owner determined to introduce modern methods despite sometimes violent opposition; his young cousin Caroline Helstone, who falls deeply in love with Robert; and Shirley Keeldar, a rich heiress who comes to live in the estate of Fieldhead, on whose land Robert’s mill stands. Robert’s business is in trouble, not so much because of the protests of the workers but because of a government decree which prevents him selling his finished cloth overseas during the duration of the war with Napoleon. He receives a loan from Miss Keeldar, and her interest in him seems to be becoming a romantic one, much to the distress of Caroline, who pines away for lack of any sign of affection from Robert.

Shirley Keeldar is a remarkable female character for the time: strong, very independent-minded, dismissive of much of the standard rules of society, and determined to decide on her own future. Interestingly, up to this point, the name “Shirley” was almost entirely a male name; Shirley’s parents had hoped for a boy. Such was the success of Brontë’s novel, however, that it became increasingly popular as a female name and is now almost exclusively so.

Although never as popular or successful as the more classically romantic Jane Eyre, Shirley is nevertheless now highly regarded by critics.

Description

Raised a slave in Nero’s court, Epictetus would become one of the most influential philosophers in the Stoic tradition. While exiled in Greece by an emperor who considered philosophers a threat, Epictetus founded a school of philosophy at Nicopolis. His student Arrian of Nicomedia took careful notes of his sometimes cantankerous lectures, the surviving examples of which are now known as the Discourses of Epictetus.

In these discourses, Epictetus explains how to gain peace-of-mind by only willing that which is within the domain of your will. There is no point in getting upset about things that are outside of your control; that only leads to distress. Instead, let such things be however they are, and focus your effort on the things that are in your control: your own attitudes and priorities. This way, you can never be thrown off balance, and tranquility is yours for the taking.

The lessons in the Discourses of Epictetus, along with his Enchiridion, have continued to attract new adherents to Stoic philosophy down to the present day.

Description

The Water of the Wondrous Isles is a landmark in fantasy fiction. First published a year after Morris’s death in 1897 by Kelmscott Press—Morris’s own printing company—the novel follows Birdalone, a young girl who is stolen as a baby by a witch who takes her to serve in the woods of Evilshaw.

After she encounters a wood fairy that helps her escape the witch’s clutches, Birdalone embarks on a series of adventures across the titular Wondrous Isles. These isles are used by Morris both as parables for contemporary Britain and as vehicles for investigating his radical socialist beliefs. As Birdalone travels through the isles she slowly evolves into the embodiment of the Victorian “new woman,” embracing hard physical labor, healthy exercise, higher education, socialist values, and financial freedom, while rejecting sexual exploitation, physical abuse of both women and children, and the restrictive sexual mores of the era. This makes her unique in the fantasy fiction of the era as one of the genre’s first examples of a strong female hero.

This socialist-feminist allegory is presented in an Arthurian-style fantasy world complete with magic, witches, fairies, knights both chivalrous and evil, and castles (indeed, anyone doubting the allegorical nature of the work only needs to look at the name of the tale’s main redoubt: “The Castle of the Quest”). The language is purposefully archaic, reveling in vocabulary drawn from the language’s Anglo roots; and the prose is lent a hypnotic quality by its lack of quotation marks to offset dialog, and its short chapters characterized by a fairy-tale-narrative voice.

Description

Upper-class New York gentleman Newland Archer is set to wed May Welland in a picture-perfect union when the bride’s cousin, Ellen Olenska, returns from a failed marriage overseas. As Newland endeavors to help Countess Olenska be reinstated into the family’s good graces, his affections for her grow. Newland soon finds himself torn between his desire to conform to the society he knows and his new-found passion for the forbidden Countess.

The Age of Innocence was originally published in 1920 as a four-part series in Pictoral Review, then later that same year as Wharton’s twelfth novel. It went on to win the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the award.

Description

Between 1906 and 1921 John Galsworthy published three novels chronicling the Forsyte family, a fictional upper-middle class family at the end of the Victorian era: The Man of Property, In Chancery, and To Let. In 1922 Galsworthy wrote two interconnecting short stories to bind the three novels together and published the whole as The Forsyte Saga.

While the novels follow the Forsyte family at large, the action centers around Soames Forsyte—the scion of a nouveau-riche London tea merchant—his wife Irene, and their unhappy marriage. Soames and his sprawling family are portrayed as stereotypes of unhappy gilded-age wealth, their family having entered the industrial revolution poor farmers and emerged as wealthy bourgeoise. Their rise was powered by their capacity to acquire, won at the expense of their capacity for almost anything else.

Thematically, the saga focuses on the mores of the wealthy upper-middle class, which was still a newish feature in the class landscape of England at the time; duty, honor, and love; and the rapidly growing differences across generations occurring in a period of war and social change. The characters are complex and nuanced, and the situations they find themselves in—both of their own making, and of the making of society around them—provide a rich field for analyzing the close of the Victorian age, the dawn of the Edwardian age, and the societal frameworks that were forged in that frisson.

Galsworthy went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 for The Forsyte Saga, one of the rare occasions in which the Swedish Academy has awarded a prize for a specific work instead of for a lifetime of work.