Best of
Victorian

1995

An Uncommon Woman - The Empress Frederick: Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm


Hannah Pakula - 1995
    of photos.

A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby


Mary S. Lovell - 1995
    Their divorce a few years later was one of England s most scandalous at that time. In her quest for passionate fulfilment she had lovers which included an Austrian prince, King Ludvig I of Bavaria, and a Greek count whose infidelities drove her to the Orient. In Syria, she found the love of her life, a Bedouin nobleman, Sheikh Medjuel el Mezrab who was twenty years her junior.Bestselling biographer Mary Lovell has produced from Jane Digby’s diaries not only a sympathetic and dramatic portrait of a rare woman, but a fascinating glimpse into the centuries-old Bedouin tradition that is now almost lost.

The Silence of Strangers


Audrey Howard - 1995
    Heiress Nella Fielden sets her heart on Jonas Townley and marries him, but his heart belongs to Nella's protegee Leah, a lowly miner's daughter. Tragedy follows when Nella learns she has a rival.

The Works of the Brontë Sisters


Anne Brontë - 1995
    This edition of poems is a reprint of the original edition first published in 1846 at the Brontes' own expense.

A World of Difference


Audrey Howard - 1995
    And when she meets ambitious young Conal McRae, she knows he's the man she must marry, despite her father's disapproval. Their courtship is fiery and their marriage passionate. But their happiness is threatened by tragic family secrets which refuse to be buried. Is Jenna destined to repeat her mother's tragedy, or will she triumph over the past and keep the man she was meant to love?

Echo of Another Time


Audrey Howard - 1995
    Harper. By the age of 18 she has become a talented cook, but when she falls in love with a Latimer, all their lives change with frightening swiftness.

Demons of the Night: Tales of the Fantastic, Madness, and the Supernatural from Nineteenth-Century France


Joan C. Kessler - 1995
    Featuring such authors as Balzac, Mérimée, Dumas, Verne, and Maupassant, this book offers readers familiar with the works of Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffman some of the most memorable stories in the genre. With its aura of the uncanny and the supernatural, the fantastic tale is a vehicle for exploring forbidden themes and the dark, irrational side of the human psyche.The anthology opens with "Smarra, or the Demons of the Night," Nodier's 1821 tale of nightmare, vampirism, and compulsion, acclaimed as the first work in French literature to explore in depth the realm of dream and the unconscious. Other stories include Balzac's "The Red Inn," in which a crime is committed by one person in thought and another in deed, and Mérimée's superbly crafted mystery, "The Venus of Ille," which dramatizes the demonic power of a vengeful goddess of love emerging out of the pagan past. Gautier's protagonist in "The Dead in Love" develops an obsessive passion for a woman who has returned from beyond the grave, while the narrator of Maupassant's "The Horla" imagines himself a victim of psychic vampirism.Joan Kessler has prepared new translations of nine of the thirteen tales in the volume, including Gérard de Nerval's odyssey of madness, "Aurélia," as well as two tales that have never before appeared in English. Kessler's introduction sets the background of these tales—the impact of the French Revolution and the Terror, the Romantics' fascination with the subconscious, and the influence of contemporary psychological and spiritual currents. Her essay illuminates how each of the authors in this collection used the fantastic to articulate his own haunting obsessions as well as his broader vision of human experience.

Hardy: Poems


Thomas Hardy - 1995
    Poems: Hardy contains poems from Moments of Vision, Satires of Circumstance, Veteris Vestigia Flammae, Heredity, Short Stories, Afterwards, and an index of first lines.

Keynotes and Discords


George Egerton - 1995
    She was the most substantial and striking of the women writers of the fin de siecle who developed the modern short story, with its focus on the 'psychological moment', its exploration of the interior landscapes of human experience, and its only sporadic commitment to a realist aesthetic. This volume contains her two best collections of short stories, Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1895).An incipient modernism can clearly be identified in her stories: there is a recurrent focus on the inner consciousness of their female subjects, revealed through reverie or dream, or through intense moments of psychological and emotional connection. The stories are full of wanderers, and have the sense of dislocation characteristic of literary modernism; their compression and resistance to narrative closure confirm their alignment with the emergent aesthetic. Coupled with this aesthetic experimentation are explorations of female sexual desire, new gender identities and the pains and pleasures of maternity. Thirty years before Virginia Woolf's annunciation of modernism in the 1920s, when she presented this 'new' aesthetic movement as an abrupt break with a worn-out nineteenth-century realism. George Egerton had penetrated the emotional and psychological tragedies of apparently unexceptional women's lives and powerfully translated these tragedies into fiction. She forged a new way of expressing women's experience: her status as an important and compelling writer is indisputable.

Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology


Angela Leighton - 1995
    Among those discussed directly are: Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Michael Field, Felicia Hemans, Adelaide Proctor, Christina Rossetti, and Rosamund Marriott Watson. Key topics dealt with include the nature of home, the market, the fallen woman and the moral law, the mother, and the muse. Critics represented are: Isobel Armstrong, Kathleen Blake, Susan Conley, Stevie Davies, Sandra M. Gilbert, Gill Gregory, Terrence Holt, Linda K. Hughes, Angela Leighton, Tricia Lootens, Jerome J. McGann, Dorothy Mermin, Margaret Reynolds, Dolores Rosenblum, Chris White, and Joyce Zonana.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti


Russell Ash - 1995
    From richly coloured watercolours of Medieval themes to oil paintings of beautiful women, Rossetti's works mirror his unconventional life and obsessions, in particular his idealized image of feminine beauty. Many works feature his highly sensuous oil paintings of the models with whom he often conducted tempestuous affairs, including Elizabeth Siddal, whom he eventually married and who died from a drug overdose; and Jane Burder, the wife of William Morris and the subject of the Rossetti painting that holds the world-record price for a Pre-Raphaelite subject.

Poems and Prose (Everyman's Library)


Christina Rossetti - 1995
    She writes of the world's beauty, but fears that it may be deceptive, even deadly. She is a religious poet, but much of her work is driven by uncertainty. Her poems are restrained, even secretive, but they seek nothing less than the mystery of Life and Death.This edition contains Rossetti's strongest and most distinctive work: poetry (including 'Goblin Market', 'The Prince's Progress', and the sonnet sequence 'Monna Innominata'), stories (including the complete text of Maude), devotional prose (with nearly fifty entries from the 'reading diary' Times Flies), and personal letters. Those poems which Rossetti published, and those which she withheld from publication, are here brought together in chronological order, allowing the reader to observe her poetic trajectory. This edition also records the major revisions made by Rossetti when preparing her poems for publication. It brings together the fullest range of Rossetti's poetry and prose in one volume, and is an indispensable introduction to this entrancing writer.

Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs


Carol Mavor - 1995
    Reading these settings performatively, Carol Mavor shifts the focus toward the subjectivity of these girls and women, and toward herself as a writer.Mavor’s original approach to these photographs emphatically sees sexuality where it has been previously rendered invisible. She insists that the sexuality of the girls in Carroll’s pictures is not only present, but deserves recognition, respect, and scrutiny. Similarly, she sees in Cameron’s photographs of sensual Madonnas surprising visions of motherhood that outstrip both Victorian and contemporary understandings of the maternal as untouchable and inviolate, without sexuality. Finally she shows how Hannah Cullwick, posing in various masquerades for her secret paramour, emerges as a subject with desires rather than simply a victim of her upper-class partner. Even when confronting the darker areas of these photographs, Mavor perseveres in her insistence on the pleasures taken—by the viewer, the photographer, and often by the model herself—in the act of imagining these sexualities. Inspired by Roland Barthes, and drawing on other theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, Mavor creates a text that is at once interdisciplinary, personal, and profoundly pleasurable.

The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, Volume I: 1829-1847


Charlotte Brontë - 1995
    As well as Charlotte's own letters from 1829 to 1847, a handful of important letters and diary extracts by her friends and family illuminate the writer's correspondence. This volume covers the period from her childhood up to the publication and review of Jane Eyre."

Complete Bronte Sisters


Emily Brontë - 1995
    "Three very different novels of love, rebellion and duty, by the world-renowned Bronte sisters"Contains complete and unabridged versions of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Agnes Grey, by Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Bronte, respectively.

The Last Duke


Andrea Kane - 1995
     Lady Daphne Wyndham is the only child of the brutal Marquis of Tragmore. Risking a beating each time she sneaks away to help the local vicar, Daphne fantasizes about the legendary Tin Cup Bandit, who robs the rich to aid the poor. His scandalous exploits inflame her rebellious spirit and fire her romantic imagination. And when he appears in her bedroom, she suspects all her wild dreams may come true.... Pierce Thornton grew up in a British workhouse, and now thirsts for vengeance against the nobility -- and the Marquis of Tragmore. As he plots to ruin Tragmore, a twist of fate opens an unexpected door, allowing him to fulfill his life-long crusade: bringing the fashionable world to its knees. But in the process he encounters a far greater peril...losing his heart to Daphne Wyndham.

Etiquette of Politeness (The Etiquette Collection)


Jan Barnes - 1995
    

Farewell in Splendor: The Passing of Queen Victoria and Her Age


Jerrold M. Packard - 1995
    25,000 first printing. $15,000 ad/promo. Tour.

Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex and Morality


Lucy Bland - 1995
    Now available again in paperback, Lucy Bland's richly textured book vividly details the private and public debates, campaigns, and struggles among feminists to resolve the key areas of sexual politics, encompassing marriage, prostitution, birth control, and sex education.

Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays


Judith Farr - 1995
    KEY TOPICS: Offers volumes of the same excellence for the contemporary moment. Captures and makes accessible the most stimulating critical writing of our time on a crucial literary figure of the past. Also included is an introduction to the author's life and work, a chronology of important dates, and a selected bibliography. MARKET:

The Return of King Arthur: The Legend Through Victorian Eyes


Debra N. Mancoff - 1995
    King Arthur Legend

Cranford And Mr. Harrison's Confessions


Elizabeth Gaskell - 1995
    This bemused tale of ancien fashions and "elegant economy" is complemented with a short story about a young surgeon's disruptive entry into Duncombe village. In both stories, Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) shows a genteel class entrenched in the receding era, while a new age presents its visiting card.