He is searching for someone morally strong enough to resist temptation, but there seems little chance he will succeed. Britain is all but totally corrupt. The aristocracy is financially and spiritually bankrupt; church leaders no longer believe in God; Victorian idealism has been banished from literature and life; and sexual morality is being undermined by the pernicious doctrines of the "New Woman." Everything and everyone is up for sale, and it takes a special kind of moral courage to resist the Devil's seductions.

    It was also a time when bicycles were wildly popular. And so, when her doctor recommended she exercise out-of-doors, Willard was determined to learn to ride. It was not easy for a woman in her fifty-third year, hampered by long skirts, but she was eager for the challenge. She hoped her example would help other women seek "a wider world." She saw cycling as a way for women to gain independence, develop confidence, and be seen by men as equals in skill. A best-seller when originally published a century ago, Willard's fascinating account of her adventure continues to enchant and inspire readers today. An introduction by Edith Mayo, curator of political history at the Smithsonian Institution, describes the life and work of Frances Willard and her role as an early leader of the women's movement. The book concludes with an illustrated essay on the history of women and cycling.

    Arguably one of the best-known Suffragette writers, Beatrice Harraden was a popular novelist who was heavily involved in the Suffragette tax resistance campaign. Her best-selling sentimental romance, Ships that Pass in the Night tells of a doomed love-affair between two patients in a tuberculosis sanitarium. This story caught the public's imagination, and the title became a byword for a fleeting or doomed love affair. The title was inspired by lines in Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn, Third Evening, Theologian's Second Tale (Elizabeth), Fourth Part.

    Then their grandmother dies and they are sent to live in Kensington with their uncle and his wife. Having run wild in the country, spent hours with the gardener (very like the gardener in The Secret Garden) and had a great deal to do and to think about, suddenly they are abandoned in a world of artifice and convention and are expected to behave artificially and conventionally. ‘It all came of so much pretending. But then it was simply impossible for the children not to pretend. It would have been so dull to have lived their child lives only as the little Conways, when they might be pretending that they were such exciting things as soldiers or savages, cab-horses or mice.’ Babs cannot, of course, stop playing, and the central theme of the book is that she has not learned how to dissemble (as opposed to playing ‘let’s pretend’) but must learn how to do so.

    After graduating from Oxford he became acutely interested in literature, beginning to write articles and criticisms. The first of these to be printed was a brief essay upon Coleridge, contributed in 1866 to the Westminster Review. A few months later (January, 1867), his essay on Winckelmann, the first expression of his idealism, appeared in the same review. In the following year his study of Aesthetic Poetry appeared in the Fortnightly Review. By the time his philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean appeared, however, he had gathered quite a following. This, his chief contribution to literature, was published early in 1885. In 1887 he published Imaginary Portraits, a series of essays in philosophic fiction; in 1889, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style; in 1893, Plato and Platonism; and in 1894, The Child in the House. His Greek Studies and his Miscellaneous Studies were collected posthumously in 1895; his posthumous romance of Gaston de Latour in 1896; and his essays from The Guardian were privately printed in 1897.