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Description: Elfride finds herself caught in a battle between her heart, her mind and the expectations of her parents and society. The novel is notable for the strong parallels to Hardy and his first wife Emma Gifford. When Elfride's father finds that his guest and candidate for his daughter's hand, architect's assistant Stephen Smith, is the son of a mason, he immediately orders him to leave. This was the third of Hardy's novels to be published and the first to bear his name.
Description: Far from the Madding Crowd was the first of Hardy's novels to apply the name of Wessex to the landscape of south-west England, and the first to gain him widespread popularity as a novelist. When the beautiful and spirited Bathsheba Everdene inherits her own farm, she attracts three very different suitors; the seemingly commonplace man-of-the-soil Gabriel Oak, the dashing young soldier Francis Troy, and the respectable, middle-aged Farmer Boldwood. Her choice...
Description: Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore her family's fortunes by claiming their connection with the aristocratic d'Urbervilles. But Alec d'Urberville is a rich wastrel who seduces her and makes her life miserable. When Tess meets Angel Clare, she is offered true love and happiness, but her past catches up with her and she faces an agonizing moral choice. Hardy's indictment of society's double standards, and his depiction of Tess as a pure woman, caused co...
Description: Hardy distrusted the application of nineteenth-century empiricism to history because he felt it marginalized important human elements. In The Trumpet Major, the tale of a woman courted by three competing suitors during the Napoleonic wars, he explores the subversive effects of ordinary human desire and conflicting loyalties on systematized versions of history.
Description: The story takes place in a small woodland village called Little Hintock, and concerns the efforts of an honest woodsman, Giles Winterborne, to marry his childhood sweetheart, Grace Melbury. Although they have been informally betrothed for some time, her father has made financial sacrifices to give his adored only child a superior education and no longer considers Giles good enough for her. When the new doctor – a well-born and handsome young man named Edred ...
Description: Elegant, fun-loving George and Marion Kerby are the toast of the town, until they wreck their flashy car and discover they've become, well, ghosts. Making the best of a bad situation, they decide that being dead is the perfect opportunity to liven up staid, stuffy Cosmo Topper. Naturally, much hilarity ensues.
Description: The Woman in White is an epistolary novel written by Wilkie Collins in 1859, serialized in 1859–1860, and first published in book form in 1860. It is considered to be among the first mystery novels and is widely regarded as one of the first (and finest) in the genre of 'sensation novels'. As was customary at that time, The Woman in White was first published as a magazine serial. The first episode appeared on 29 November 1859, following Charles Dickens's own A Tale…
Description: Claude Wheeler craves excitement, far more than he can ever find as a farmer's son. He encounters more at university, where the modern world beyond farm life offers new thrills and challenges, only to lose them as the farm calls him back. World War I offers him even more . . . but he may crave excitement more than life itself can allow. Wanting it as much as he does can't protect him from the consequences of personal bravado in an age of killing machines.
Description: He was a reporter from Venus with an assignment on Earth. He got his story but, against orders, he fell in love—and therein lies this story.
Description: A romance set in Italy involving a love triangle of Helen, Inez, and Jack, tangled up in a spell of dual personalities, in the present and in the past. Excerpts:... SLOWLY THE SPELL BEGAN TO WORK UPON INEZ’ BRAIN. SHE WAS NO LONGER IN THE PRESENT—SHE WAS A WOMAN OF ITALY OF FOUR CENTURIES BACK.... “It has actually happened at last,” the letter began, “and your favorite wager of ‘a thousand to one on the unexpected’ has really won. In other words, I, Helen Ca...
Description: Detective stories in which the great Thomas Carnacki investigates the supernatural using scientific tools, such as photography, and tools that are augmented by theories of the supernatural, such as the electric pentacle, which uses vacuum tubes to repel supernatural forces.
Description: Using language with elements of the medieval tales which were his models, Morris tells the story of Ralph of Upmeads, the fourth and youngest son of a minor king, who sets out, contrary to his parents' wishes, to find knightly adventure and seek the Well at the World's End, a magic well which will confer a near-immortality and strengthened destiny on those who drink from it. Although the novel is relatively obscure by today's standards it has had a significa...
Description: Excerpt: When Jack Chetwynd dropped into the Bundar Cafe at Delhi one scorching afternoon in September of last year and informed me that we were ordered off to the Punjaub, I could have shouted for joy. I did not do it, though, for I well knew how scornfully Jack would regard any such demonstration. I merely nodded my head, lazily, and went on reading the Post with as much calmness as if such news was a mere every day affair. Yes, my boy, went on Jack, dropp...
Description: Here is Eclipse, but without all the details in between. Strictly conversations.
Description: It's father went missing in the military, her mothers a drunk, and now her best friends can read minds. and they are all in a cult read to watch JTs life fall apart and see how she puts it back together.
Description: Zelda decides that Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet is too depressing so she takes it into her own hands to recreate the story. Using Characters from my Space Pirate Series friends and foes play the similar roles from the play but kind of changing things up a bit. Note: It's not part of the actual series of Space Pirate but it might help to have read the books so you can get an idea of how the characters are going to act out this version of Romeo & Juliet.