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Emma, by Jane Austen, is a novel about youthful hubris and the perils of misconstrued romance. The novel was first published in December 1815. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian-RegencyEngland; she also creates a lively comedy of manners among her characters.  Before she began the novel, Austen wrote,...

With twenty two letters, addressed to various already deceased authors, Andrew Lang discusses literary subjects with his usual humour and acidity. The impulse for the writing of the letters came, almost as a joke, from the editor of the 'St. James's Gazette,' and sixteen of the letters collected in the volume appeared first in that journal. According to the author, "some of the Letters are...

The Hero is a little known masterpiece of W Somerset Maugham. It is much more clinical and less romantic than his two great novels, “The Moon and Sixpence” and “The Razor’s Edge”, the latter having foretold of the mass interest in Eastern religions and metaphysics that would follow. The Hero is essentially an acerbic look at the roots of English society at...

Sea Warfare first appeared as a single publication in 1916 (Macmillan, London). The page and line numbers in these notes refer to that volume. However, its three component parts had appeared previously, both in Great Britain and the USA – the USA publications being primarily for copyright purposes. Sea Warfare was a compilation of a series of thirteen newspaper articles. Six were published...

The Barrack-Room Ballads is the collective name given to a series of songs and poems by Rudyard Kipling, dealing with the late-Victorian British Army and mostly written in a vernacular dialect. The series contains some of Kipling's most well-known work, including the poems "Gunga Din", "Tommy" and "Danny Deever", and helped consolidate his early fame as a poet. The first poems were published in...

England, My England is the title of a collection of short stories by D. H. Lawrence. Individual items were originally written between 1913 and 1921, many of them against the background of World War I. Most of these versions were placed in magazines or periodicals. Ten were later selected and extensively revised by Lawrence for the England, My England volume. This was...

The Prussian Officer tells of a Captain and his orderly. Having wasted his youth gambling, the captain has been left with only his military career, and though he has taken on mistresses throughout his life, he remains single. His young orderly is involved in a relationship with a young woman, and the captain, feeling sexual tension towards the young man, prevents the orderly from engaging in the...

Liza of Lambeth (1897) was W. Somerset Maugham's first novel, which he wrote while working as a doctor at a hospital in Lambeth, then a working class district of London. It depicts the short life and death of Liza Kemp, an 18-year-old factory worker who lives together with her ageing mother in the fictional Vere Street off Westminster Bridge Road (real) in Lambeth. All in all, it gives the...

Lawrence’s Tortoises poems were first published as a group in New York in 1921, then included in the First English edition of Birds, Beasts and Flowers in 1923. This lovely Cheloniidae Press edition, edged in vellum over handmade paper-covered boards, is illustrated with eight wood engravings by Alan James Robinson. Number 71 of 200 copies signed by the artist on the colophon page, it is in...

Bay - A book of poems by D. H. Lawrence. "WHERE the trees rise like cliffs, proud and blue-tinted in the distance, Between the cliffs of the trees, on the grey-green park Rests a still line of soldiers, red motionless range of guards Smouldering with darkened busbies beneath the bay-onets' slant rain. Colossal in nearness a blue police sits still on his horse Guarding the path;...

Under the Deodars (published 1888) is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. Table of Contents: The Education of Otis Yeere At the Pit's Mouth A Wayside Comedy The Hill of Illusion A Second-rate Woman Only a Subaltern In the Matter of a Private The Enlightenments of Pagett, M. P. External links

Also known as the "Roman Elegies," Erotica Romana is von Goethe's literary tribute to human sexuality and eroticism. Written in 24 elegies to emulate classical Roman elegy writers such as Tibullus, Propertius, and Catullus, von Goethe creates a lyrical work of art that has often been subject to censorship. 

Life's Handicap, Being Stories of Mine Own People was published in 1891. Most of the stories had previously appeared in periodicals. Table of Contents: Preface The Lang Men o' Larut Reingelder and the German Flag The Wandering Jew Through the Fire The Finances of the Gods The Amir's Homily Jews in Shushan The Limitations of Pambe Serang Little Tobrah Bubbling Well Road "The City of...

Look! We Have Come Through! was first published in the United Kingdom in 1917 by Chatto and Windus, London; a US edition based on sheets from the Chatto edition was issued by B.W. Huebsch, New York, in 1918. A second, illustrated edition was issued by the Ark Press, Cornwall, in 1958, and this was in turn reissued in the USA in 1959 by The Rare Books Collection of the...

Set in the Midlands, Lawrence's Touch and Go is a three-act play dealing with clash between capitalism and labor. In his attempt to organize miners Willie Houghton argues that capitalism is like a wheel-cart and labor is like the frog crushed beneath its wheels. "The essence of tragedy, which is creative crisis, is that a man should go through with his fate, and not dodge it and go bumping into...

The Story of the Gadsbys is a story by Rudyard Kipling. It was originally published as no. 2 of the Indian Railway Library in 1888. The Story of the Gadsbys is written in dramatic form, consisting of eight short scenes (listed below). This short pamphlet, of 100 pages, was later collected in book form as the second part of Soldiers Three. "Poor Dear Mamma" "The World Without" "The Tents of...

Lady Susan is a short epistolary novel by Jane Austen, possibly written in 1794 but not published until 1871.  This epistolary novel, an early complete work that the author never submitted for publication, describes the schemes of the main character—the widowed Lady Susan—as she seeks a new husband for herself and one for her daughter. Although the...

Indian Tales (1890) - A collection of tales inspired by Kipling's days living and working in India.

Aaron's Rod is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, started in 1917 and published in 1922.  The protagonist of this picaresque novel, Aaron Sisson, is a union official in the coal mines of the English Midlands, trapped in a stale marriage. He is also an amateur, but talented, flautist. At the start of the story he walks out on his wife and two children and decides on impulse...

Persuasion is Jane Austen's last completed novel. She began it soon after she had finished Emma and completed it in August 1816. She died, at age 41, in 1817; Persuasion was published in December of that year (but dated 1818).  Persuasion is linked to Northanger Abbey not only by the fact that the two books were originally bound up in one volume...