Drawing on diaries, letters, wills, newspapers, and other sources, Jane C. Nylander provides intimate details about preparing dinner, spinning and weaving textiles, washing and ironing laundry, planning a social outing, and exchanging food and services. Probing behind the many myths that have grown up about this era, Nylander reveals the complex reality of everyday life in old New England. "Nylander . . . invites her readers to enjoy her copious knowledge of the interiors and domestic management of late-18th-century New England homes. The imaginatively illustrated [book] is dedicated to the notion that the details of everyday life form the core of human experience."—Martha Saxton, The New York Times Book Review A fact-filled, copiously illustrated, revealing survey of Yankee life and households in an earlier time, . . . informative and valuable for its many glimpses of American interiors."—Kirkus Reviews  "A delightfully intimate portrayal of New England home life. . . . Enlivened by 162 period illustrations, [Nylander’s] survey affords a rare glimpse of middle- and upper-class housework, clothing, kitchens, diet, socializing and much else."—Publishers Weekly A century-long portrait of day-to-day activities in a New England home. . . . Nylander’s nitty-gritty approach is absorbing. . . . Photographs from various historical societies along with period sketches and paintings add pizzazz and authenticity."—Booklist  "A  visual and narrative feast."—Robert St. George, University of Pennsylvania

    Poems: Rossetti contains a full selection of Rossetti's work, including her lyric poems, dramatic and narrative poems, rhymes and riddles, sonnet sequences, prayers and meditations, and an index of first lines.

    in black-and-white. Opening note by Coretta Scott King. For the first time, the most important account ever written of a childhood in slavery is accessible to young readers. From his days as a young boy on a plantation to his first months as a freeman in Massachusetts, here are Douglass's own firsthand experiences vividly recounted--expertly excerpted and powerfully illustrated.

    The issue of women and reading--what they should read; what they should be protected from; how, what, and when they should read--was the focus of lively discussion in the nineteenth century in a wide range of media. Flint uses recent feminist analyses of how women read as a context for her detailed and readable study of these debates, exploring in a variety of texts--from magazines like Woman's World and My Lady's Novelette to works of literature like Jane Eyre and The Portrait of a Lady--the range of stereotypes and directives addressed to women readers, and their influence on the writing of fiction. She also looks at how women readers of all classes understood their own reading experiences.

    In a work that is uniquely comprehensive and theoretically astute, Isobel Armstrong rescues Victorian poetry from its longstanding sepia image as `a moralised form of romantic verse', and unearths its often subversive critique of nineteenth-century culture and politics.

    Richly illustrated with over 100 color photographs and drawings, Daily Life in a Victorian House offers up a slice of history in an inviting, accessible way.

    Not for nothing was Robert Louis Stevenson the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.The greatest of Scottish novelists, Stevenson lived a life as extraordinary and as absorbing as his books. But it was a life tormented by an autocratic father, recurring illness, the prudery of the Victorian reading public and, most of all, the stresses imposed on him by his wife and stepchildren.This powerful new study is published to mark the centenery of Stevenson's death at the age of forty-four.

    Finding this true particularly of modernist writing, Jerome McGann demonstrates the extraordinary degree to which modernist styles are related to graphic and typographic design, to printed letters--black riders on a blank page--that create language for the eye. He sketches the relation of modernist writing to key developments in book design, beginning with the nineteenth-century renaissance of printing, and demonstrates the continued interest of postmodern writers in the visible language of modernism. McGann then offers a philosophical investigation into the relation of knowledge and truth to this kind of imaginative writing.Exploring the work of writers like William Morris, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, as well as Laura Riding and Bob Brown, he shows how each exploits the visibilities of language, often by aligning their work with older traditions of so-called Adamic language. McGann argues that in modernist writing, philosophical nominalism emerges as a key aesthetic point of departure. Such writing thus develops a pragmatic and performative answer to Plato in the matter of poetry's relation to truth and philosophy.

    Watson. The detective is at the height of his powers and the volume is full of famous cases, including 'The Red-Headed League, ' 'The Blue Carbuncle, ' and 'The Speckled Band.'

    

    Wherever possible, their story is told using their own words - the letters they wrote to each other, Emily and Anne's secret diaries, and Emily's exchanges with the luminaries of literary England - or those of the people who were closest to them - their brother Branwell, their father the Reverend Patrick Bronte, and their novelist friend Mrs. Gaskell. The Brontes sketched and painted their worlds too, in delicate ink washes and watercolors of family and friends, animals, and the English moors. These pictures illuminate the text, as do the tiny drawings the Bronte children made to illustrate their imaginary worlds. In addition, there are facsimiles of their letters and diaries, paintings by artists of the day, and pictures of period household items. The Brontes at Haworth is a unique and privileged view of the real lives of these women, writers, and sisters - their own view - and is certain to be cherished by any admirer of this remarkable literary family.

    Much less is known about the governess in reality. This book is the first rounded exploration of what the life of the home schoolroom was actually like. Drawing on original diaries and a variety of previously undiscovered sources, Kathryn Hughes describes why the period 1840-80 was the classic age of governesses. She examines their numbers, recruitment, teaching methods, social position and prospects.The governess provides a key to the central Victorian concept of the lady. Her education consisted of a series of accomplishments designed to attract a husband able to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed from birth. Becoming a governess was the only acceptable way of earning money open to a lady whose family could not support her in leisure.Being paid to educate another woman's children set in play a series of social and emotional tensions. The governess was a surrogate mother, who was herself childless, a young woman whose marriage prospects were restricted, and a family member who was sometimes mistaken for a servant.

    His life holds a mirror to personalities and developments of nearly a century from the Crimean War to the Battle of Alamein.Highly sociable, an accurate observer and inveterate correspondent and diarist, his view is of a unique spectrum of peple from President Taft to the Emperor of Japan, Lord Wolsely to Arabi Pasha, Ethel Smyth to Melba, Gladys Deacon to Nancy Astor, Rudyard Kipling to Lord Esher, Gladstone to John Brown.He fought at the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, served in India and was a principal actor in the drama of the Esher army reforms. As Governor-General of Canada (1911-16) he calmed tensions between British and French Canadians and resolved disputes between Canada and USA through his easy access to the White House. He inaugurated the Indian constitutional reforms in 1921.His life also offers an insight into the development of the monarchy and the ways of the Sovereign in relation to the political and social life of the nation over a long period. His descendants are the King of Sweden and the Queen of Denmark.

    Now Tussie-Mussies is available in a stunning paperback edition. A celebration of craft, lore, and language, Tussie-Mussies is a full-color guide to tussie-mussies, how to make them, and how the symbolic meanings of flowers and herbs have developed over the centuries. Roses that are red mean only one thing-Love-while a yellow rose may range from Friendship to Jealousy. Daisies are for Innocence, ivy for Fidelity, rosemary for Remembrance. Then comes the delightful task of arranging individual flowers and herbs together to compose a specific message to a friend or loved one. A floral poet, Geraldine Laufer shows how to make 60 bouquets-tussie-mussies to declare Ardent Love, say Happy Birthday, celebrate a Newborn, mark an Anniversary, honor a Mentor, admit an Infatuation, or even announce a Bitter Rivalry. Indeed, any sentiment can be crafted with a few blooms, woolen yarn, and scissors.

    

    He argues that James was primarily motivated by religious concerns in his writings and that this fact has been obscured by the artificial scholarly division of his philosophy, psychology, and religion--a symptom of the professionalization which James himself strenuously resisted in his own time. Ramsey believes that James is best understood in his historical context, as a representative of a society and culture struggling to come to terms with modernity. Much of James's religious work is a direct reflection of what has been called the spiritual crisis of the Gilded Age, a crisis which Ramsey examines in illuminating detail. James's religious vision, in Ramsey's view, hinges on the recognition and acceptance of contingency--the knowledge that we are at the mercy of change and chance. With so little else to rely on, James believed, people must learn to submit freely and responsibly into one another's care. Ramsey reintroduces James's thought into the contemporary discussion, and puts forward the kind of religious alternative that James was pointing to in his work: not worship, but acquiescence in a world of mutual relations; not obedience to authority, but conversion to the freedom of responsibility.

    Yet it was in the magnificent Ritz that the sheltered beauty was pursued by a wicked French Comte--and rescued by a splendid English Marquis. The well-bred daughter of an Earl could never have imagined that she would be the cause of a duel ... nor that her pure dreams would be dashed by a scandalous proposal. But true Love is a miracle that smooths all paths--to the promise of everlasting bliss...