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Winner of the 2010 Costa Novel Award and a Sunday Times bestseller, THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE by Maggie O'Farrell is a gorgeously written story of love and motherhood from the author of HAMNET and I AM, I AM, I AM. When the sophisticated Innes Kent turns up on her doorstep, Lexie Sinclair realises she cannot wait any longer for her life to begin, and leaves for London. There, at the heart of the 1950s Soho art scene, she carves out a new life. In the present day, Elina and Ted are reeling from the difficult birth of their first child. Elina struggles to reconcile the demands of motherhood with her sense of herself as an artist, and Ted is disturbed by memories of his own childhood that don't tally with his parents' version of events. As Ted begins to search for answers, an extraordinary portrait of two women is revealed, separated by fifty years, but connected in ways that neither could ever have expected.
This anthology brings together twenty-eight lively and readable short stories by nineteenth-century women writers, including gothic tales to romances, detective fiction and ghost stories. Containing short fiction by well-known authors such as: * Maria Edgeworth * Mary Shelley * Elizabeth Gaskell * Margaret Oliphant Nineteenth-Century Short Stories by Women also includes: * a scholarly introduction * biographies for each of the authors * full explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading * a critical commentary, publication details and historical context * a full and wide-ranging bibliography The bibliography of resources and further reading will enable those interested in pursuing research on any author or topic to do so with ease, and a thematic index will enable teachers to select material best suited to their courses.
'Highly original and elegantly-written ... The first of what promises to be a distinguished series.' P.D. James Death is not a rehearsal... It's March 1934, and Golden Age crime writer Josephine Tey is travelling from Scotland to London to celebrate what should be the triumphant final week of her celebrated play, Richard of Bordeaux. However, a seemingly senseless murder puts her reputation, and even her life, under threat. An Expert in Murder is both a tribute to one of the most enduringly popular writers of crime and an atmospheric detective novel in its own right.
This ground-breaking anthology brings together a wide selection of women's writings from the Victorian period (excluding fiction and drama), most of which cannot be easily found elsewhere. There are writings from more than 60 authors covering a broad range of public and private genres from the period including poetry, critical essays, biography, travel literature, political commentary, letters, diaries and journals, and care has been taken to balance extracts and complete texts.
Short-listed for the Booker Prize and named 'one of the greatest novels of all time' by The Observer, this riveting novel shows Beryl Bainbridge at her darkly comic best. Freda and Brenda spend their days working in an Italian-run wine-bottling factory. A work outing offers promise for Freda and terror from Brenda; passions run high on that chilly day of freedom, and life after the outing never returns to normal. Inspired by author Beryl Bainbridge's own experiences working at a London wine-factory in the 1970s, The Bottle Factory Outing examines issues of friendship and consent, making the novel timelier than ever. Readers will be dazzled by this offbeat, haunting yet hilarious Guardian fiction prize-winning novel. 'An outrageously funny and horrifying story' Graham Greene (Observer)
Partly autobiographical, this is the second title in Judith Kerr’s internationally acclaimed trilogy of books following the life of Anna through war-torn Germany, to London during the Blitz and her return to Berlin to discover the past...
The Godwinian Novel is a pioneering analysis of the school of fiction inaugurated by William Godwin, and developed in the works of his principal followers, Charles Brockden Brown and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. In the first study of these authors as a historically specific group, Pamela Clemit argues for a greater unity between Godwin's fictional techniques and his radical political philosophy than has been perceived. Her analysis of the works of Brown and Mary Shelley, moreover, reveals how these writers modified, reshaped, and redefined Godwin's distinctive themes and techniques in response to shifting ideological pressures in the post-revolutionary period. Examining prose fiction in a period traditionally seen as dominated by poetry, Clemit stresses the necessity for a revised view of British Romanticism. Uncovering the links between Godwin's fictional analysis of subjective experience and his progressive political philosophy, The Godwinian Novel paves the way for a reappraisal of the apparently quietistic and introspective concerns of other writers of the period.
The Rector’s Daughter is the story of Mary Jocelyn, a woman who fears life is passing her by. Having lost her mother and her beloved invalid sister, Mary shares her days in sleepy Dedmayne with her father, the severe and distant Canon Jocelyn. Then, with the arrival in the village of Robert Herbert, her quiet, ordered existence is changed forever.