Showing results by author "ciesse" in All Categories

Our heroine, Anne Garland, lives quietly in a rural community deep in the English countryside. However, the arrival of several regiments preparing for an expected invasion brings colour and chaos to the county. A graceful and charming young woman, Anne is pursued by three suitors: John Loveday, the trumpet-major in a British regiment, honest and loyal; his brother Robert, a merchant seaman and womaniser, and Festus Derriman, the cowardly son of the local squire. Set at the time of the Napoleonic wars, this is the author's only historical novel, and unusually for Hardy's books, some of the ...

"Harold Transome is a landowner who goes against his family's political tradition (much to his mother's distress), while Felix Holt is a sincere radical. The setting of the book, the 1832 parliament election, is used to discuss the social problems of that time. A secondary plot involves Esther Lyon, the stepdaughter of a minister who is the real heiress to the Transome estate, with whom both Harold Transome and Felix Holt fall in love. Esther loves poor Felix Holt, but would she choose a comfortable life with Harold Transome?" (Summary by Stav Nisser)

The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family was written in serial form in 1854- 1855 by the author of such works as Vanity Fair, The Book Of Snobs. It tells the story of a few generations of the Newcome family: their rise to respectability, marriages, love, and the culture in which they lived. The novel teaches the reader what it was like to live in Victorian England - Summary by Stav Nisser

"Mrs. Dalloway" recounts a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in the middle of June 1923. Clarissa Dalloway is a high society London lady. On that day, she is hosting a party, meeting people, going to the park, and reflecting on her choices. Where would she have been if she married Peter Walsh and not Richard Dalloway? What if she would not invite this or that person to her party? Her feelings about Peter Walsh grow because on that particular day he returns from India to settle some affairs in London. Other people also reflect on their choices. Mr. Smith who cannot move on from the horrors ...

Asgard Stories - Tales from Norse Mythology. To all our Children who have loved the hearing of these Asgard Stories. This little volume is the outcome of several years experience in telling to classes of children the classic myths, both southern and northern. "A broad simplicity, so very different from the light gracefulness of the old Greek paganism, distinguishes this Norse system. It is thought, the genuine thought of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly opened to the things about them, - a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of things, - the first characteristic of all good thought in ...

Trafalgar, es el primero de los 46 Episodios Nacionales, escritos por Benito Pérez Galdós, que es considerado el mayor novelista español después de Cervantes. Galdós narra la intervención de Gabriel Araceli, al servicio de D. Alonso Gutiérrez de Cisniega, capitán de navío, en la batalla de Trafalgar a los catorce años de edad, el 21 de Octubre de 1805. Ante el promontorio de Trafalgar las naves inglesas, a las órdenes de Nelson, se enfrentaron a la flota franco-española en la legendaria batalla que supuso el comienzo del dominio inglés en los mares y la primera derrota de ...

Jack and Jill went up a hill To coast with fun and laughter. Jack fell down and broke his crown, And Jill came tumbling after. When Jack and Jill tumble off of their sled on the first good snow of the season, their injuries cause them to be bedridden for many months putting an end to their fun and frolics. Their parents and friends fill their days with the joys of Christmas preparations, a theatrical production and many other imaginative events. Both learn how to become better friends to each other and their other school mates through their many trials. This is sure to become a family favorite...

Originally staged in the Teatro Español in 1901, Electra is a controversial Spanish drama that documents the trials and tribulations of its innocent heroine. Electra is a young woman of unknown parentage who is raised in a convent in France and, after the death of her mother Eleuteria, adopted by her aunt and uncle. Electra soon falls in love with the scientist Maximo, but an intricate web of rumors and lies threatens to ruin their relationship. In this play, Benito Pérez Galdós tackles a number of hot-button themes: fanaticism, superstition, social justice, rationalism, and the powers of ...

The Brothers Karamazov (Russian: Братья Карамазовы) is the final novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, and is generally considered the culmination of his life's work. The book portrays a parricide in which each of a murdered man's sons share a varying degree of complicity. The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel that explores deep into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, reason, and modern Russia. Since its publication, it has been acclaimed all over the world by ...

After The Three Muskateers and Twenty Years After the adventurous story of Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D'Artagnan continues!The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later (French: Le Vicomte de Bragelonne ou Dix ans plus tard) is the last of the Musketeer novels. It is usually divided into four volumes and this third volume contains chapters 141-208. (Summary by Diana Majlinger)

The story of an exciting test of wits between world-class thief Arsène Lupin and master detective Herlock Sholmes. Translated from the French. - Summary by Andy Harrington

George Eliot's own favorite among her novels, this novel tells the story of Romola, the intelligent daughter of a blind scholar, who is falling in love with a man who is going to change her life and the politics of Florence in a way she doesn't like. Set in 15th century Florence, it is "a deep study of life in the city of Florence from an intellectual, artistic, religious, and social point of view". Summary by Stav Nisser and Wikipedia.

Shakespeare's Sonnets, or simply The Sonnets, comprise a collection of 154 poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare that deal with such themes as love, beauty, politics, and mortality. The poems were probably written over a period of several years. (Summary from wikipedia)

The novel details the lives of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, a brother and sister growing up on the river Floss near the village of St. Oggs, evidently in the 1820’s, after the Napoleonic Wars but prior to the first Reform Bill (1832). The novel spans a period of 10-15 years, from Tom and Maggie’s childhood up until their deaths in a flood on the Floss. The book is fictional autobiography in part, reflecting the disgrace that George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) herself had while in a lengthy relationship with a married man, George Henry Lewes. Maggie Tulliver holds the central role in the book, as ...

Ce n'était pas une petite tâche que de peindre les deux ou trois mille figures saillantes d'une époque, car telle est, en définitif, la somme des types que présente chaque génération et que La Comédie Humaine comportera. Ce nombre de figures, de caractères, cette multitude d'existences exigeaient des cadres, et, qu'on me pardonne cette expression, des galeries. De là, les divisions si naturelles, déjà connues, de mon ouvrage en Scènes de la vie privée, de province, parisienne, politique, militaire et de campagne. Dans ces six livres sont classées toutes les Études de moeurs qui...

Adam Bede, the first novel written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1859. It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respected scholar of her time. The novel has remained in print ever since, and is used in university studies of 19th century English literature. The story's plot follows four characters rural lives in the fictional community of Hayslope—a rural, pastoral and close-knit community in 1799. The novel revolves around a love triangle between beautiful but thoughtless Hetty Sorrel, Captain Arthur Donnithorne, ...

Father Goriot (Le Père Goriot), published in 1835, is widely considered to be Balzac's finest and most popular novel. It is set in Paris in 1819, after Napoleon's defeat and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. France was undergoing massive social upheaval, as the new bourgeoisie jockeyed for position alongside the old aristocracy. Against this backdrop, we follow the lives of Goriot, an old man who irrationally dotes on his daughters; Vautrin, a shadowy criminal mastermind; and Rastignac, a young man from the provinces who studies how to navigate the complexities and climb the ladder of ...

Nanda Brookenham is coming of age, and thus 'coming out' in London society - which leads to complications in her family's social set in London's fin de siècle life. James presents the novel almost entirely in dialogue, an experiment that adds to the immediacy of the scenes but also creates serious ambiguities about characters and their motives. Summary by Anna Simon, adapted from Wikipedia.

Eugénie Grandet, first published in 1833, is one of Honoré de Balzac's finest novels, and one of the first works in what would become his large novel series titled La Comédie Humaine. Set in a provincial town in post-Revolutionary France, the story deals with money, avarice, love, and obsession. A wealthy old miser must manage the passion of his innocent daughter, who later has to navigate on her own the treacherous ways of a world in which money is "the only god." Balzac's meticulous use of psychological and physical detail influenced the development of 19th-century literary realism, in ...

These twenty-eight lectures to laymen are elementary and almost conversational. Freud sets forth with a frankness almost startling the difficulties and limitations of psychoanalysis, and also describes its main methods and results as only a master and originator of a new school of thought can do. A text like this is the most opportune and will naturally more or less supersede all other introductions to the general subject of psychoanalysis. It presents the author in a new light, as an effective and successful popularizer, and is certain to be welcomed not only by the large and growing number ...