Walking away from her stifling father and the social conventions of her time, she leaves drab suburbia for Edwardian London and encounters an unknown world of suffragettes, Fabians and free love. But it is only when she meets the charismatic Capes that she truly confronts the meaning of her new found freedom. Ann Veronica caused a sensation, damned in the press and preached against from the pulpits when it was first published due to Wells' ground breaking treatment of female sexuality. A fascinating description of the women's suffrage movement, Ann Veronica offers an optimistic depiction of one woman's sexual awakening and search for independence.

    We are shown the matriarchs around whom their families spin; but whether they direct their children gently or forcefully, in the end they have to accept them as they are.

    The only thing that can be guaranteed is that it will be his next earth-movingly funny bestseller. And we are still pretty confidently saying it will not be about earthworm migration patterns in East Devon.This is the story of Ned Maddenstone, a nice young man who is about to find out just what hell it is to be one of the stars' tennis balls.  For Ned, 1978 seems a blissful year: handsome, popular, responsible and a fine cricketer, life is progressing smoothly for him, if not effortlessly. When he meets Portia Fendeman his personal jigsaw appears complete. What if her left-wing parents despise his Tory MP father? Doesn't that just make them star-crossed lovers? And surely, in the end, won't the Fendemans be won over by their happiness?  But, of course, one person's happiness is another's jealous spite. And spite is about to change Ned's life forever.  A promise made to a dying teacher and a vile trick played by fellow pupils rocket Ned from cricket captain to solitary confinement, from head boy to political prisoner. Twenty years later, Ned returns to London a very different man from the boy seized outside a Knightsbridge language college.  A man implacably focused on revenge. Revenge is a dish he plans to savour and serve to those who conspired against him, and to those who forgot him.

    This is maternity and childbirth twenty years before Sylvia Plath. The eponymous "squire", whose husband is abroad on business, happily awaits the arrival of the Unborn in a country house; sensuous descriptions of her own body, her garden, her greed for food and port wine, and her sharply differentiated children, merge with her thoughts about the new baby, about middle age and pain, about her quarrelling staff, and about the waning of the sexual imperative. The arrival of the midwife, an old and tested friend and a dedicated professional, initiates some extraordinary conversations about babies, gender, vocation and the maternal impulse. The relationship of these two women, as they go through one of the most ordinary yet astonishing rituals of life, is portrayed with a tender affectionate care and a deep respect. This is a very surprising book for its time, for any time."- Margaret Drabble"If a man had a child and he was also a writer we should have heard a lot about it. I wanted The Squire to be exactly as objective as if a man had had a baby."- Enid Bagnold

    Actual opening line of the novel is: "To J. Halford, Esq. Dear Halford, when we were together last..."This is the story of a woman's struggle for independence. Helen "Graham" has returned to Wildfell Hall in flight from a disastrous marriage. Exiled to the desolate moorland mansion, she adopts an assumed name and earns her living as a painter.

    Trollope's 1875 tale of a great financier's fraudulent machinations in the railway business, and his daughter's ill-use at the hands of a grasping lover is a classic in the literature of money and a ripping good read as well.

    Samuel Butler's autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood shines an iconoclastic light on the hypocrisy of a Victorian clerical family's domestic life. It also foreshadows the crumbling of nineteenth-century bourgeois ideals in the aftermath of the First World War, as well as the ways in which succeeding generations have questioned conventional values. Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the summits of human achievement," this chronicle of the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex spans four generations, focusing chiefly on the relationship between Ernest and his father, Theobald. Written in the wake of Darwin's Origin of Species, it reflects the dawning consciousness of heredity and environment as determinants of character. Along the way, it offers a powerfully satirical indictment of Victorian England's major institutions—the family, the church, and the rigidly hierarchical class structure.

    Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes pregnant as a result of a one night stand.

    When the firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley hires Dougal Douglas (a.k.a. Douglas Dougal) to do "human research" into the private lives of its workforce, they are in no way prepared for the mayhem, mutiny, and murder he will stir up. "Not only funny but startlingly original," declared The Washington Post, "the legendary character of Dougal Douglas...may not have been boasting when he referred so blithely to his association with the devil." In fact this Music Man of the thoroughly modern corporation changes the lives of all the eccentric characters he meets, from Miss Merle Coverdale, head of the typing pool, to V.R. Druce, unsuspecting Managing Director.

    A cheating wife, back with her boring husband, is wracked with agonizing love for the unavailable partner of her brief fling; a writer seeks inspiration at a writers' retreat whilst avoiding the group seducer's invitation; a wife's party flirtations propel her possessive husband into another woman's bed; two fun-loving women face a sinister sexual assault during a Greek holiday; a teenager experiences enraptured detachment during her first kiss.Beautifully written, perceptive, touching, and funny, Midsummer Night in the Workhouse is Diana Athill at her best.

    The use of metaphor is delicate and subtle; often the women are strong and capable and the men less so; shallow and selfish motives are exposed.The dates of these stories range from 1909 to 1986 and there are thirty in all. The ten stories which are already in print in Persephone editions of their work are by Katherine Mansfield, Irène Némirovsky, Mollie Panter-Downes (twice), Elizabeth Berridge, Dorothy Whipple, Frances Towers, Margaret Bonham, Diana Gardner and Diana Athill. The ten stories which have already been published in the Quarterly and Biannually are by EM Delafield; Dorothy Parker; Dorothy Whipple; Edith Wharton; Phyllis Bentley; Dorothy Canfield Fisher; Norah Hoult; Angelica Gibbs; Penelope Mortimer; and Georgina Hammick. And lastly the ten stories which are new are by Susan Glaspell, Pauline Smith, Malachi Whitaker, Betty Miller, Helen Hull, Kay Boyle, Shirley Jackson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Elizabeth Spencer and Penelope Fitzgerald.

    As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of pleasure-gardens, theatre visits, and balls. But Evelina's innocence also makes her a shrewd commentator on the excesses and absurdities of manners and social ambitions—as well as attracting the attention of the eminently eligible Lord Orville. Evelina, comic and shrewd, is at once a guide to fashionable London, a satirical attack on the new consumerism, an investigation of women's position in the late eighteenth century, and a love story. The new introduction and full notes to this edition help make this richness all the more readily available to a modern reader.

    In Basil's secret and unconsummated marriage to the linen-draper's sexually precocious daughter, and the shocking betrayal, insanity, and death that follow, Wilkie Collins reveals the bustling, commercial London of the 19th century wreaking its vengeance on a still powerful aristocratic world.

    Henry Smith, and he replied that Mrs. Cornwallis was expecting her. To Caroline, following him through a wide shabby hall, the whole episode was beginning to feel like a nightmare. She was intensely conscious of herself-of her dress, her voice, the way she placed her feet. She felt like a cook-general going to be interviewed."Mrs. Henry Smith," said the butler contemptuously.In Four Gardens, the most emotional and nostalgic of Margery Sharp's brilliant novels, we meet the lovable Caroline Smith (née Chase) and glimpse the stages of her life through the gardens in which she digs. There's the lavish abandoned one in which she has no right to dig; the tiny one in which she has no time to dig; the extravagant one, complete with stubborn gardener, in which she's not allowed to dig; and one final garden, hers and hers alone, in which she finds quiet, wise contentment. As we follow Caroline through the vicissitudes of life, we meet her adoring husband Henry, her shockingly modern children Leon and Lily, and friends and neighbours from the self-righteous Ellen Taylor to the posh but hilariously down-to-earth Lady Tregarthan.

    Grey and his wife, speculation is rife that one of them might marry the local apothecary, Edward Hope. Although he is immediately attracted to Margaret, Hope is ultimately persuaded to marry the beautiful Hester and becomes trapped in an unhappy marriage. His troubles are compounded when a malicious village gossip accuses Hope of grave-robbing, threatening his career. A powerful exploration of the nature of ignorance and prejudice, Deerbrook also may be regarded as one of the first Victorian novels of English domestic life.Excerpt:Every town-bred person who travels in a rich country region, knows what it is to see a neat white house planted in a pretty situation, - in a shrubbery, or commanding a sunny common, or nestling between two hills, - and to say to himself, as the carriage sweeps past its gate, "I should like to live there," - "I could be very happy in that pretty place." Transient visions pass before his mind's-eye of dewy summer mornings, when the shadows are long on the grass, and of bright autumn afternoons, when it would be luxury to saunter in the neighbouring lanes; and of frosty winter days, when the sun shines in over the laurustinus at the window, while the fire burns with a different light from that which it gives in the dull parlours of a city. Mr. Grey's house had probably been the object of this kind of speculation to one or more persons, three times a week, ever since the stage-coach had begun to pass through Deerbrook. Deerbrook was a rather pretty village, dignified as it was with the woods of a fine park, which formed the back-ground to its best points of view. Of this pretty village, Mr. Grey's was the prettiest house, standing in a field, round which the road swept. There were trees enough about it to shade without darkening it, and the garden and shrubbery behind were evidently of no contemptible extent. The timber and coal yards, and granaries, which stretched down to the river side, were hidden by a nice management of the garden walls, and training of the shrubbery. In the drawing-room of this tempting white house sat Mrs. Grey and her eldest daughter, one spring evening.