Was Charles Dickens the secret lover of young actress Nelly Ternan? How would a man of his renown have hidden such an affair? This book offers a complete account of the scandal that threatened to ruin Dickens - now dramatised as The Invisible Woman, a 2014 BBC film starring Ralph Fiennes.
Close friendships are a heart-warming feature of many of our best-loved works of fiction. This book explores 24 fictional friendships in succinct, structured entries, spanning 400 years, and writers as diverse as Jane Austen to John Steinbeck. Beautifully packaged, this is the ideal gift for your literature-loving friend.
J.R.R. Tolkien's son and literary editor, Christopher Tolkien, published 24 of his father's posthumous works during his own lifetime. This collection of essays by world-renowned scholars, together with family reminiscences, sheds new light on Tolkien's work. This illustrated volume is essential reading for Tolkien scholars, readers and fans.
Greenery blends current ecological concerns with informed analysis of medieval literature to arrive at new readings of late medieval English texts, some canonical (eg Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Chaucer's Knight's and Franklin's Tales) some less frequently studied (lyrics, Patience, Sir Orfeo).
For most of the sixteenth century, English poets were clearly anxious about the grief expressed in their funeral poems and often rebuked themselves for indulging in it, but towards the end of the century this defensiveness about mourning became less pressing and persistent.
Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes gives a first-hand account of his feelings about the unique countryside that was the source of his inspiration. He addresses concerns that are relevant today, such as how the growing number of visitors, and the money they might bring, would affect such a small and vulnerable landscape.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE In this contemplative short narrative, artist and acclaimed writer Sara Baume charts the daily process of making and writing, exploring what it is to create and to live as an artist.
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame.
A fusion of travel literature and cultural criticism investigating the dark history of the US and exploring how past horrors - from witch trials to slavery and genocide - continue to haunt the national consciousness.
Hadley examines how James disentangles himself from the moralizing frame through which English-language novels in the nineteenth century had imagined sexual passion. She shows how he pursues his ambitious enterprise to represent the privileges and the pains of turn-of-the-century leisure-class society.
Told through the lense of Henry James's relationship with two women who particularly shaped his writing, Henry James is a unforgettable read by one of our best-loved biographers.
"A brilliant selection . . . it is in short a voyage of discovery, an adventure and this the log of that voyage in the life of a probing and powerful writer." -Robert R. Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
Not long after, Auster received a letter from Coetzee, suggesting they begin exchanging letters on a regular basis and, 'God willing, strike sparks off each other'. Here and Now is the result of that proposal: an epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends.