Green VMCs and their Cover Art (part 2)
ConversazioniVirago Modern Classics
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1BeyondEdenRock
Some time ago a painting caught my eye, and I realised that I recognised it because it was on the cover of one of my collection of green Virago Modern Classics. I picked up my book to find out the name of the artist and the artwork, and that sparked an idea.
The book covers are lovely, but the paintings really come alive when they are released from their green frames. Sometimes just a detail has been chosen, or the painting has been cropped because it wasn’t book-shaped. That may be the best way to make a good cover for a book, but it shouldn’t be the only way we see the art-work.
And so these threads are to celebrate the books and the art that was carefully chosen to adorn them.
2BeyondEdenRock
'Portrait of the Reverend Robert Walker Skating' by Sir Henry Raeburn
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'The Flint Anchor' by Sylvia Townsend Warner (#435)
'John Barnard, leading merchant at a Norfolk port, is a pillar of nineteenth-century rectitude. Though stern and aloof with his indolent, tippling wife and watchful children, he is undermined by helpless love for his pretty, cold-hearted daughter Mary. The Flint Anchor subverts the rules of the historical novel and shows how family history is made - which stories can be trusted, whose voices hold influence and whose are forgotten. Wit, charm and intelligence illuminate several decades of family life and the events of small town society in this tragi-comedy of manners, the last of the author's seven novels.'
3BeyondEdenRock
'A V.A.D. Ambulance Driver' by Gilbert Rogers
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'Not So Quiet' by Helen Zenna Smith (#305)
"It is such fun out here, and of course I'm loving every minute of it"... tell them that all the ideals and beliefs you ever had have crashed about your gun-deafened ears... and they will reply on pale mauve deckle-edged paper calling you a silly hysterical little girl."
'These are the thoughts of Helen Smith, one of "England's Splendid Daughters", an ambulance driver at the French front. Working all hours of the day and night, witness to the terrible wreckage of war, her first-hand experience contrasts sharply with her altruistic expectations. And one of her most painful realisations is that those like her parents, who preen themselves on visions of glory, have no concept of the devastation she lives with and no wish for their illusions to be shaken'.
6BeyondEdenRock
'Mäda Primavesi' by Gustav Klimt
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'Olivia' by Olivia (Dorothy Strachey) (#268)
'In this famous novel, first published in 1949, a woman recollects an extraordinary year "when life was, if not at its fullest, at any rate at its most poignant . . . the year when I first became conscious of myself". Olivia is sixteen years old when she goes to Les Avons, a finishing school near Paris, run by two Mademoiselles. It is a place of few rules, of laughter and lively conversation -- a welcome surprise for a reserved young English girl. But the gaiety and freedom of Les Avons is only surface deep and emotional liaisons and jealousies form the hidden curriculum. Very quickly Olivia too is caught up in its spell, overwhelmed by her increasing infatuation with Mademoiselle Julie. Here she describes the powerful allegiances and repressed desires which smolder at this secluded school, and the intensity and desperation of adolescent love.'
7BeyondEdenRock
'Vase of Roses, Roses sur Fond Vert' by Oldile Redon
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'A Wreath of Roses' by Elizabeth Taylor (#392)
'Spending the holiday with friends, as she has for many years, Camilla finds that their private absorptions - Frances with her painting and Liz with her baby - seem to exclude her from the gossipy intimacies of previous summers. Anxious that she will remain encased in her solitary life as a school secretary, Camilla steps into an unlikely liaison with Richard Elton, a handsome, assured - and dangerous - liar. Replete with the subtle wit that is her hallmark, and a tender and perfectly evoked portrait of friendship between women, 'A Wreath of Roses' is nonetheless Elizabeth Taylor's darkest novel: an astute exploration of the fear of loneliness and its emotional armour.'
8kaggsy
9BeyondEdenRock
10BeyondEdenRock
'Portrait of a Village Woman' by George Clausen
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'Daughter of Earth' by Agnes Smedley (#72)
'This lyrical autobiographical novel tells the story of Marie Rogers, born into harsh rural poverty in northern Missouri at the end of the last century. Hers is a family nurtured in poverty-her father a charming but shiftless itinerant worker, her mother undernourished and overworked. In a world where the choices for a woman are marriage or prostitution, Marie is fiercely determined to choose neither. Struggling to educate herself, haunted by the family she leaves behind, Marie's restless nature cannot reconcile sexual desire with love and comradeship. Marriage ends in divorce, political involvement in imprisonment, a passionate love affair in betrayal. But through all this Marie finds herself-the past conquered, a new future ahead.'
11BeyondEdenRock
A bestseller in the 1920s
'Ophelia' by Annie Ovenden
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'The Constant Nymph' by Margaret Kennedy (#121)
'Teresa is the daughter of a brilliant bohemian composer, Albert Sanger, who with his "Circus" of precocious children, slovenly mistress, and assorted hangers-on lives in a rambling chalet high in the Austrian Alps. Thin, childish, green-eyed, with an indomitably eccentric taste in clothes, Teresa is "unbalanced, untaught and fatally warm-hearted". At fourteen she has already fallen in love with Lewis Dodd, a gifted composer like her father. Confidently she awaits maturity (and Lewis). But this longed-for destiny is shattered by her father's sudden death: Lewis is drawn away by Tessa's beautiful cousin Florence. However, neither his marriage nor Tessa's exile to an English boarding school can break the spell the gods have placed on Lewis and his nymph. Tessa remains constant, her splendid heart all too ready for the rewards that love so inevitably brings.'
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14BeyondEdenRock
'Night & Day' by Roland Penrose
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'Blue Skies' and 'Jack and Jill' by Helen Hodgman (#309)
'Blue Skies - The Tasmanian sun flashes upon weather-boarded houses and a holiday-brochure beach. Early-morning hoovering gives way to empty afternoons when the clock always says three and women and children huddle together in steaming heaps by the sea. But this stagnation will be shattered - by incest, suicide and murder.'
Jack and Jill - While Douggie is away, his wife dies; his grief-slimed and hungry young daughter Jill gives a kookaburra laugh on his return four days later. Thereafter, they live hand-to-mouth amidst the dogs, dust and flies of the New South Wales outback. Then Jack arrives on their doorstep. Like the nursery rhyme, it is the start of no ordinary romance.'
15BeyondEdenRock
'Seated Girl with Dog' by Milton Avery
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'That's How It Was' by Maureen Duffy (#99)
'Paddy is illegitimate, the daughter of another Paddy -- an active member of the IRA who abandons her English mother, Louey, at her birth. This is the story of that mother -- frail, but with an indomitable spirit -- of that daughter -- and of their life together, seen through the clear eyes of Paddy as a child and adolescent. The working class life of wartime England is wonderfully evoked and the subtle changing relationship between Paddy and Louey is movingly conveyed.'
16bleuroses
Edited to add that this would make the PERFECT coffee-table book! Jane, I wonder if Virago would be interested in your project. That would be so lovely.
17Sakerfalcon
Here's a sample
18lippincote
19BeyondEdenRock
I have the Penguin book and pick it up often.
20BeyondEdenRock
'Hera' by Francis Picabia
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The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter (#96)
'New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where black, dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn, a young Englishman whose fate is that of Tiresias. For in the arid desert, now the post-menopausal part of the earth, a many-breasted fertility goddess will wield the obsidian scalpel that is to transform him into the new Eve. This is the story of how Evelyn learns to be a woman - first in the brutal hands of Zero, the poet, the ragtime Nietzsche, the one-eyed, one-legged monomaniac; then through the gentle touch of the ambiguous, ancient Tristessa, the beautiful ghost of Hollywood past, myth made flesh, in a glass palace full of worn-out dreams. And the story tells of how, in a California torn by civil war, in a deserted cave by the sea, Eve comes to learn at last a kind of enlightenment.'
21BeyondEdenRock
'Anne Hyde, Duchess of York' by Peter Lely
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Love Letter Between a Nobleman and His Sister by Aphra Behn (#240)
'Philander urges Sylvia to accept his love - an illicit passion which transgresses all social codes and whose avowal endangers each of them. This remarkable novel - one of the first to have been published in England - is the fictionalised account of a scandal that was the talk of London when, in 1682, Lord Grey of Werke was tried and found guilty of 'debauching' and eloping with his young sister-in-law, Lady Henrietta Berkeley. Soon after, implicated in the Rye House Plot to assassinate King Charles, Lord Grey made a dramatic escape, sailing to the continent with Lady Henrietta. Published in three parts between 1684-87, the novel ran into at least sixteen editions by the end of the 18th century. Eloquent and beautifully constructed, it combines romance and the defiance of society with political intrigue and betrayal.'
'All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their mind' - Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
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24BeyondEdenRock
>23 LyzzyBee: I read it years ago but didn't get on with it, much as I love many of Angela Carter's books. Yes, it is a great cover though.
25BeyondEdenRock
'Lady in Grey' by Daniel MacNee
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'Crossriggs' by Mary and Jane Findlater (#203)
'Alexandra Hope lives with her unworldly, vegetarian father, her widowed sister and five nieces and nephews in the Scottish village of Crossriggs. Whilst her sister Mathilda perfectly plays that Victorian role of feminine helplessness, Alex - clever, plain with a sharp wit - refuses the first suitable man to propose, choosing spinsterhood and the support of her poverty-stricken family. But earning a living is just one difficulty to be faced - for Alexandra secretly loves a married man. First published in 1908, Crossriggs is both a delight Austenesque tale of village life and a powerful portrait of a woman who combines the morality of her Protestant heritage with all the courage and passion of the 'New Woman' of the 1890's.'
26BeyondEdenRock
'The Mother and Sister of the Artist' by Berthe Morisot
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'Hester' by Margaret Oliphant (#152)
'Catherine Vernon is the head of the family bank, reputed in the Home Counties to be "solid as the Bank of England". Loved and revered by the people of Redborough, she is nevertheless seen as a none-too-benevolent despot by those of her family who, dependent upon her charity, live in the nearby "Vernonry". Catherine is a proud businesswoman, in firm control of her life, her work and her family. She lives with her young cousin Edward, grooming him to succeed her in the bank, loving him like a son. Then fourteen-year-old Hester and her widowed mother join the tenants of the Vernonry and Catherine finds she has met her match in this strong-willed girl. We watch as Hester grows up through the 1860s and 70s and as their silent confrontation comes to a head over their love for the same man: an absorbing struggle which alters forever the fortunes of Hester and the Vernon family.'
27kayclifton
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30BeyondEdenRock
'Marie Laurencin, Cecilia de Radmazo and the Dog Coco' by Marie Laurencin
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'Two Serious Ladies' by Jane Bowles (#8)
'With exhilarating wit, Two Serious Ladies follows the decline into debauchery of two very different women: Christina Goering, a wealthy spinster in pursuit of sainthood - she ends up as a high class call-girl; and Frieda Copperfield, who abandons her stick of a husband for love of a Pacifica, a Panamanian prostitute - she ends up more or less permanently under the influence. Though they might seem to end on a low note from certain points of view, from another their glorious independence, unlimited lust for doing exactly as they like and hilarious eccentricity in pursuing the paths of their choice triumphantly celebrates the joys of female freedom. First published in American in 1943 and in England in 1965, this brilliant comedy of manners has over the years gained a legendary reputation for its author, Jane Bowles - a bizarre and marvellous writer, a true original.'
31BeyondEdenRock
'The Mauve Tablecloth' by Henri Le Sidaner
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'A Wreath for the Enemy' by Pamela Frankau (#294)
'When Penelope Wells, precocious daughter of a poet, meets the well-behaved middle-class Bradley children, it is love at first sight. But their parents are horrified by the Wells' establishment - a distinctly bohemian hotel on the French Riviera - and the friendship ends in tears. Out of these childhood betrayals grow Penelope, in love with an elusive ideal of order and calm, and Don Bradley, in rebellion against the philistine values of his parents. Compellingly told in a series of first-person narratives, their stories involve them with the Duchess, painted and outre; the crippled genius Crusoe; Crusoe's brother Livesey, and the eccentric Cara, whose brittle and chaotic life collides explosively with Penelope's.'
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33kayclifton
34Sakerfalcon
35kayclifton
I also remember reading The Winged Horse a few years ago and that has disappeared from the library's collection.
37Sakerfalcon
38BeyondEdenRock
It is maddening when libraries have only parts of trilogies or short series. I remember that my library had books 1 and 3 of Margery Sharp's Martha trilogy but not book 2.
39BeyondEdenRock
'The Red Feather' by Augustus John
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'The True Heart' by Sylvia Townsend Warner (#3)
'Sukey is an orphan, in service, the lowest of the low. It is 1873, and in her first position as a servant-girl on a farm in the Essex Marshes, she meets Eric--gentle, simple, a 'holy fool'. The lovers are parted by Eric's rich mother, ashamed of her idiot son. But nothing can deter Sukey. Only Queen Victoria, she feels, can help, so she sets off to see her. Extraordinary things happen on this heroic journey, but Sukey's simple love and courage carry her to final victory--reunion with her beloved Eric and love triumphant.'
40BeyondEdenRock
'Self Portrait' by Hilda Carline
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'The Third Miss Symons' by F.M. Mayor (#36)
'First published in 1913, this is the story of Henrietta Symons from her birth to her death, and the most perfect account in English fiction of those women who, throughout the ages, have neighter married nor loved - the spinster, the maiden Aunt, the surplus woman. Henrietta is the third daughter in a large Victorian family, the misfit girl without the beauty or the talent to be loved. Querulous, bad-tempered, her meaningless life passes aimlessly by. But Henrietta has one saving grace. She knows herself to be what she is, and self-knowledgem however bitter, turns her life of defeat into a certain kind of victory. . .'
41kayclifton
42BeyondEdenRock
'The Bay' by Thea Proctor
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'Devoted Ladies' by Molly Keane (#138)
'It is 1933. Jessica and Jane have been living together for six months. They are devoted friends -- or are they? Jessica, with her dark charm, has a vicious way with words and a temperament that inclines towards violence. She loves her friend with the cruelty of total possessiveness; Jane with her geometric lines and blonde hair, is perfect - but for the thread of a scar by her mouth. She is rich and silly and drinks rather too many brandy and sodas. Their friend Sylvester regrets that she should be 'loved and bullied and perhaps even murdered by that frightful Jessica', but decides it's none of his business. However, when the Irish gentleman George Playfair meets Jane, he decides it's very much his business. He entices Jane to Ireland where the battle for her devotion begins. It will be a fight to the death. But who will win?'
43BeyondEdenRock
'Disappointed Love' by Frank Danby
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'Gone to Earth' by Mary Webb (#17)
'Hazel Woodus is a creature of the wild. Daughter of a Welsh gypsy and a beekeeper, she is happiest living in her forest cottage in the remote Shropshire hills, where she is at one with the winds and the seasons, and protector and friend of the wild animals she loves. Like Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Hazel Woodus has a beauty and innocence hat is an irresistible magnet to men. Edward Marston, the gentle local minister, offers her human companionship and love. Jack Reddin, the local squire, awakens her to the deeper, more physical elements of human nature. Blinded by passion, both of these men fail to comprehend Hazel's essence. Like any natural being, she cannot be harnessed; her dark fate unfolds relentlessly.'
44BeyondEdenRock
'Head of a Girl' by Célestin Joseph Blanc
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'Shadows on the Rock' by Willa Cather (# 160)
'At the end of the seventeenth century, on that "grey rock in the Canadian wilderness" known as Quebec, a French family, the Auclairs, begin a life very different from the one they knew in Paris. On her mother's death ten-year-old Cécile is entrusted with the care of the household, and of her father, Euclid, the town's apothecary. Two years later, in late October 1697, as the red-gold autumn sunlight pours over the rock "like a heavy southern wine", Cécile and her father prepare for the long, difficult winter ahead with no word from home - news of events in the world they have left behind must wait until spring, when the annual boats from France are able to make their way up the St. Lawrence. For her father it will be a painful exile, but for the young Cécile life holds innumerable joys as old ties are relinquished and new ones are formed...'
45BeyondEdenRock
'A Window on the Hawkhill' (from 'Women of Dundee,1964–1966'). Photograph by Joseph McKenzie
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'Liza's England' by Pat Barker (#417)
''The Century's Daughter' is Pat Barker's most brilliant achievement yet - the story of a northern working-class community seen through the eyes of Liza Jarrett, born on the last stroke of midnight as the twentieth century begins. Liza never forgets her mother's humiliation in the steel magnet's house where she cleans: her childhood teaches her much about loyalty, love and fortitude. Growing up in the First World War, she married Frank - mystic, faith healer and unemployed steel worker - and, supported by neighbours and friends, brings up her children through the hardship of the Depression. The Second World War brings the greatest trial of Liza's strength, but she survives, humour intact, into the sixties and the seventies, caring for her beloved granddaughter, Kath, only to see 'progress' do what Depression and war failed to do: break the community that nourished her.
This is also Stephen's story, the tale of a young community worker alienated by education and homosexuality from parents he can now hardly talk to and a job he bitterly defines as finding ways for the unemployed to pass their time. Stephen comes to Liza to offer help, but stays instead to be helped.
A remarkable mixture of naturalistic style and poetic sensiblity, this outstanding novel captures flawlessly the taut, hard humour and warmth of people who have had short shrift both in literature and in life.'
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48BeyondEdenRock
'Der Schieber' (The Profiteer) by Heinrich Maria Davringhausen
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'A Little Tea, a Little Chat' by Christina Stead (#59)
'It is 1941 and war is imminent. Robert Grant is a man in his fifties, living on the seamier side of New York. Life is a game and he makes his own rules, whether trading in cotton, writing a best seller, or pursuing his only hobby - seduction (and betrayal). He searches for easy women - the cheaper the better, the more the merrier: always on the lookout for a new face, a new phone number, 'a little tea, a little chat'. Enjoying his intrigues, he receives little pleasure - and gives none, until he encounters Barbara, the 'blondine' a big, handsome, sluttish woman of thirty-two. In Barbara, he meets his match.
49BeyondEdenRock
'Harlem, 1934' by Edward Burra
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'The Street' by Ann Petry (#200)
'It is New York City, 1944. Leaving a broken marriage, Lutie Johnson and nine-yer-old Bub, move to a rundown tenement in 116th Street, where the heavy sour smell of garbage lingers in its dingy airless rooms. Determined to make a proper home for her son, she struggles to earn money, singing in a nightclub. But Lutie is Black, and 'too good-looking to be decent' and slowly she becomes trapped in a vicious network of corruption. This powerful story of the ghetto nightmare of Harlem, by an important exponent of the Richard Wright school of protest fiction, was first published in 1946.'
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51kayclifton
52BeyondEdenRock
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54BeyondEdenRock
'The Cane Town' by Arthur Evan Read
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'Lantana Lane' by Eleanor Dark (#212)
'Lantana, bushy and massive, is Australia's most uncontrollable tropical weed. Inland from the Pacific coast, where the pineapple plantations grow, sprawls the lantana in all its luxuriance. Here, too, putting up constant fight against the weed, is the small farming community of Lantana Lane. Though they stoutly declare that farming means drudgery, misery, penury, monotony, bankruptcy and calamity - that it is, in short, a mug's game - they are all firmly and happily wedded to the land, and therefore, naturally, to the lantana. From Aunt Isabelle, part-pioneer, part-Parisienne, to Nelson the one-eyed kookaburra bird, each of the Lane's inhabitants makes their own inimitable contribution to this engaging and witty portrait of community life.'
55BeyondEdenRock
‘La Guéirdon rue Seguier’ by Raoul Dufy
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'A Woman of My Age' by Nina Bawden (#366)
'Elizabeth and Richard, eighteen years married, have come to Morocco on holiday, journeying from its fertile coast to the barren uplands beyond the Atlas mountains. As the adventures and the disasters of their travels unfold, so to does Elizabeth's account of the desert her life has become. Her grievances and frustrations are credible and sympathetically told, yet, sumultaneously and subversively, Nina Bawden demonstrates the inevitable ambivalences and deceptions within marriage. These tragi-comic tensions are highlighted by the unexpected arrival of a friend travelling with a much younger lover and by the potentially oppressive companionship of the garrulous Mrs Hobbs with her considerate, quietly literary husband. As the story moves towards a shocking catastrophe and an extremely surprising coda, Nina Bawden deploys her themes - marriage, families, expectations and betrayals - with poise, wit and charm, and proves once again that there is no more subtle chronicler of the human heart.'
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57lippincote
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59BeyondEdenRock
'Madame Lacroix' by Giovanni Boldini
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'Angel' by Elizabeth Taylor
''Angelica Deverell is fifteen years old at the turn of the century. She is the daughter of a widow who keeps a grocery shop in a dreary provincial backstreet, working hard to pay for Angel's education so she can 'better herself'. But Angel rejects the drabness of her daily live and, retreating into a world of romantic dreams, she begins to write stories remarkable for their extravagance and fantasy. For those around her it is simply 'folie de grandeur', but Angel knows better. She knows that she is different, that she will grow up to be a feted authoress, owner of great riches and of the mysterious Paradise House ...'
60BeyondEdenRock
'Self Portrait' by James Tissot
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'The Gods Arrive' by Edith Wharton (#353)
'Halo Tarrant, her marriage at an end, sets sail for Europe with the young writer Vance Weston 'like someone stepping into hot sunlight from a darkened room'. They are leaving behind the familiar pattern of New York literary life so brilliantly evoked in 'Hudson River Bracketed', to which this novel is a companion volume. Temperamental, selfish, arrogant, Vance thinks of Halo as his mentor and guide, but the pressures of their irregular relationship and of his literary ambitions drive Vance into a restless search for stimulus from which Halo is increasingly excluded. First published in 1932, this is a convincing account of a writer's struggle to be true to his vision and of the strain on two lovers, dependent yet determined on a lofty ideal of individual freedom.'
61BeyondEdenRock
'The Mirror' by William Orpen
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'The House on Clewe Street' by Mary Lavin (#266)
'Theodore Coniffe, austere property owner in Castlerampart, looks forward to the birth of an heir when his third and youngest daughter, Lily marries. A son is born, but the father, Cornelius Galloway, is a spendthrift who dies young, leaving the child to the care of Lily and her sisters, Theresa and Sara. Their love for Gabriel is limited by religious propriety and his youth is both protected and restrained. At the age of twenty-one Gabriel runs away to Dublin with Onny, the kitchen maid. Here they tumble into bohemian life. But Gabriel is ill-suited to this makeshift freedom and finds the values of Clewe Street impossible to evade.'
62BeyondEdenRock
'The Merry Go Round' by Ernest Procter
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'Devil by the Sea' by Nina Bawden (#433)
"The first time the children saw the Devil, he was sitting next to them in the second row of deckchairs in the band-stand. He was biting his nails."
'So begins the horrifying story of a madman loose in a small seaside town - his prey the very young and the very old. Seen through the eyes of Hilary - a precocious, highly imaginative, lonely child - it is a chilling story about the perceptiveness of children, the blindness of parents and the allure of strangers. As the adults carry on with their own grown-up capers, Hilary is led further and further into the twilight world of one man's terrifyingly warped view of normal life. But will she have the sense to resist it?'
63BeyondEdenRock
'Portrait of Olga Kokhlova' by Pablo Picasso
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'The Stone Angel' by Margaret Laurence (#251)
'In this beautifully crafted novel, first published in 1964, Margaret Laurence explores the life of one woman, the irascible, fiercely proud Hagar Shipley. Now over ninety and approaching death, she retreats from the bitter squabbling of her son and his wife to reflect on her past - her marriage to tough-talking Bram Shipley ('we'd each married for those qualities we later found we couldn't bear'), her two sons, her failures, and the failures of others. Her thoughts evoke not only the rich pattern of her past experience but also the meaning of what it is to grow old and come to terms with mortality.'
64BeyondEdenRock
'Head of a Jamaican Girl' by Augustus John
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'Liana' by Martha Gellhorn (#248)
'The year is 1940. France has fallen to the Germans, but on the tiny French Caribbean island of Saint Boniface nothing absorbs the inhabitants more than the news of wealthy Marc Royer's marriage to the young mulatto, Liana. Marc himself is impervious to the scandal - Liana, after all, is "something he had bought for use when he could not have what he loved" - but for Liana the price of becoming a "white wife" is alienation both from her own people and from those whom, for a time, she tries to emulate. Only with Pierre, her teacher, does she feel herself free, but he is white, and a man, and in the end knows where his allegiances lie. Liana does not have that certainty and in this disturbing novel about the sadness and inhumanity of oppression, her plight speaks to us as powerfully today as when Liana was first published in 1944.'
65kaggsy
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67LyzzyBee
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69kayclifton
The book is on my list of favorites and I've read it twice.
71BeyondEdenRock
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73BeyondEdenRock
'The Annunciation' by Frederick Patrick Marriott
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'The Land of Spices' by Kate O'Brien (#287)
'On an early October day in 1912 three postulants receive the veil at Compagnie de la Sainte Famille, a lakeside Irish convent. When Eileen O'Doherty, beautiful and adored, kneels before the Bishop, a wave of hysteria sweeps through the convent. Only two remain distanced: Reverend Mother and six-year old Anna Murphy. Between them an unspoken allegiance is formed that will sustain each through the years ahead as Mere Marie-Helene seeks to understand a childhood trauma, to recover the power to love and combat her growing spiritual aridity, and as Anna, clever, self-contained, develops the strength to overcome loss and to resist the conventional demands of her background.'
74BeyondEdenRock
'Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose' by John Singer Sargent
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'Sisters by a River' by Barbara Comyns (#164)
'The river is the Avon, and on its banks the five sisters are born. The river is frozen, the river is flooded, the sun shines on the water and moving lights are reflected on the walls of the house. It is Good Friday and the maids hang a hot cross bun from the kitchen ceiling. An earwig crawls into the sweep's ear and stays there for ten years. Moths are resurrected from the dead and bats become entangled in young girls' hair. Lessons are done in the greenish light under the ash-tree and always there is the sound of water swirling through the weir. A feeling of decay comes to the house, at first in a sudden puff down a dark passage and the damp smell of cellars, then ivy grows unchecked over the windows and angry shouts split the summer air, sour milk is in the larder and the father takes out his gun. The children see a dreadful snoring figure in a white nightshirt, then lot numbers appear on the furniture and the family is dispersed ...'
75kayclifton
One of her memorable statements was that she was now "redundant".
I think that Margaret Laurence was not old herself when she wrote the book.
76BeyondEdenRock
'Calla Lilies' by Hannah Gluckstein
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'A Saturday Life' by Radclyffe Hall (#267)
'Confronted with the news of her daughter's naked dancing, Lady Shore is temporarily distracted from the Egyptian papers littering her desk. At three years old Sidonia could draw; a spate of morbid poetry followed, and now, at the age of seven, her Greek movement is superb. Having little comprehension of modern civilisation, Lady Shore asks her sharp and monocled friend Francis to guide this extraordinary child. As she grows older, Sidonia's various and intuitive talents show no sign of abating. Increasingly precocious and superior, she moves on -- from the frowsy atmosphere of a sculpture studio to singing lessons with the white-clad and extensive Ferrari family in Florence.'
77BeyondEdenRock
'At the Window' by Patricia O'Brien
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'Nobody's Business' by Penelope Gilliatt (#334)
'An elderly writer of popular comedies and her liberal husband, a judge, are accosted in mid-swim by three crass archivists. In distracting their inquisitors, the couple show the greatest mannerliness while treading water. A famous cellist develops an unruly attachment to his bed. His accompanist suggests an analyst, but takes the sessions himself, lending a fond angle to the transference. A quiet, wise man watches his blustering City stepson take over his house and his being and has not the heart to see his usurping heir's action as the pattern of push and shove. With assurance, acuity and her lucid wit, Penelope Gilliatt lays bare the non-utterances that are the crucial ellipses of the human temperament. Candid, resonant and always compassionate, these are unforgettable tales from a genius of the short story.'
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'June' by Ellen Day Hale
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'The Brimming Cup' by Dorothy Canfield (#254)
'One day in 1920 Marise watches her youngest child depart for his first day at school and feels redundant. Absorbed in her role as wife and mother she has not been aware of the slow ebbing of her spirit, nor the way in which her marriage, though comfortable, and happy, has lost its passion. As the year progresses Marise continues as the pivot of the household, drawing new neighbors into the family circle and the Vermont community. Doing so, she reassesses her marriage and the values on which it is based, each day underlined by the questions she now asks herself -- and sharpened by her increasing attraction to another man.'
81BeyondEdenRock
'At the Piano' by Harold Knight
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'The Squire's Daughter' by F. M. Mayor (#260)
'At the age of twenty-one Ron is witty and assured, delighting in the glamour of her London set and resisting her role as the Squire's daughter. She is used to the adoration of men and, "busy in an existence that made deep feeling difficult", is so far untouched by it. Now the Squire is faced with the necessity of selling Carne, the ancestral home which symbolises so much for him, yet means little to his children. Whilst the older generation acknowledges change with pain and reluctance, Ron and her contemporaries are dismissive of the values their parents uphold. But Ron's bravado is as impermanent as the privilege of her class and her life will be changed when she falls in love...'
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'On a Gold Field' by Charles-Lucien Leander
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'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (#50)
'Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrenched this small literary masterpiece from her own experience. Narrated with superb psychological skill and dramatic precision, it tells the story of a nameless woman driven mad by enforced confinement after the birth of her child. Isolated in a colonial mansion in the middle of nowhere, forced to sleep in an attic nursery with barred windows and sickly yellow wallpaper, secretly she does what she has to do - she writes. She craves intellectual stimulation, activity, loving understanding, instead she is ordered to her bedroom to rest and 'pull herself together'. Here, slowly but surely, the tortuous pattern of the wallpaper winds its way into the recesses of her mind...'
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'Self Portrait' by George Washington Lambert
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'Trooper to the Southern Cross' by Angela Thirkell (#171)
'Major Bowen is a fine upstanding Australian officer. He has survived the First World War - Egypt, Gallipoli, France - and found a dinkum Pommie missis in London. After the Armistice he and Celia set out for God's Own Country on the troop ship 'Rudolstadt'. With them are other officers and their families, plus 800-odd rioting diggers and a gang of prisoners on the lower decks. Theirs is a dry ship, ingeniously sabotaged by the Germans - and a long journey lies ahead...'
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'Spanish Landscape with Mountains' by Dora Carrington
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'Mandoa Mandoa' by Winifred Holtby (#88)
'Mandoa is a small African state: at its head a Virgin Princess, conceiving (immaculately) further princesses. The old traditions remain undisturbed until Mandoa's Lord High Chamberlain, Safi Talal, visits Addis Ababa. There he discovers baths and cocktail shakers, motor cars and the cutlery from Sheffield, telephones and handkerchiefs. In short, he has seen an apocalyptic vision - a new heaven and a new earth.
Meanwhile in England it is 1931. Maurice Durrant, youngest director of Prince's Tours Limited, has won North Donnington for the Conservatives. His socialist brother Bill is unemployed and their friend Jean Stanbury loses her job on "The Byeword", a radical weekly paper. How all three, and others too, find themselves in Mandoa for the wedding of the Royal Princess to her Arch-archbishop is hilariously told in this wonderful satirical novel, first published in 1933.'
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Dreaming Head by John Armstrong
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Surfacing by Margaret Atwood (#8)
'Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices.'
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>91 LyzzyBee: It passed me by as a cover, but when I saw that painting it was love.
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'A Woman Darning' by William Leech
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'Never No More' by Maura Laverty (#169)
'On the edge of the Bog of Allen with its hedges of foaming May blossom and twisted mountain ash lies the little lost village of Ballyderrig. It is 4th October 1920 and thirteen-year-old Delia looks forward to a new life. Her father dead, her mother, brothers and sisters prepare to move to the town of Kilkenny. But Delia stays behind, going to live with her beloved Grandmother in an old farmhouse outside the village. And thus begin the happiest years of this young girl's life: years filled with the beauty of the Irish countryside, the taste of Gran's baked hare, the texture of young mushrooms picked at dawn, the rituals of the turf-cutting season, and much much more. As the seasons come and go we watch Delia grow up until, one cold November day, now seventeen, she stands poised for independence - and Spain.'
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'Young Woman in a Green Cap' by Armand Point
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'The Lifted Veil' by George Eliot (#189)
'Latimer, a sensitive and intellectual man, finds he has clairvoyant powers. Then he has a vision of a woman, 'pale, fatal-eyed', whom he later meets: she is Bertha Grant, his brother's fiancee. Entranced, bewildered, Latimer falls under her spell, unwilling to take heed of the warning visions which beset him. In 1859 George Eliot interrupted her work on 'The Mill on the Floss' to write this unusual novella. Reminiscent of Mary Shelley and Mary E. Braddon, 'The Lifted Veil' embarrassed her publishers by its exploration of the 'pseudosciences' and its publication was delayed. It first appeared in 1878, together with 'Silas Marner' and 'Brother Jacob' in a Cabinet edition of George Eliot's work and was not published as a single volume until 1924. A chilling tale of moral alienation and despair, this forgotten novella testifies to George Eliot's little-known interest in the supernatural.'
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'Clara' by Dod Procter
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'Bid Me to Live' by H.D. (#158)
'It is 1917 and Julia Ashton lives in a shuttered room in Queen's Square, Bloomsbury. A young wife, no longer happy, she mourns the loss of her baby, and lives that war-time life of love and death as her poet husband, Rafe, comes and goes from the trenches of the First World War. In this 'Other Bloomsbury', a world of part make-believe, where the actors play at life and sex, Julia refuses to come to terms with her husband's infidelity, her failing marriage, and her private world of pain. Then into her trance-like state breaks Frederick, the writer with the flaming beard and the driving, volcanic genius. Only when she flees the fog and fever of London to seek a new calm in the wild countryside of Cornwall, can Julia face the truth about herself, her marriage, and her future with the forceful Frederick....
The imagist poet Hilda Doolittle first published this directly autobiographical novel in 1960. With the characters of Julia, Rafe, Frederick and his wife, Elsa, H.D. presents a startling, truthful portrait of herself, her husband Richard Aldington, her friends, D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, and others (Cecil Gray, Dorothy Yorke, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound) in London during the First World War. In language of extraordinary beauty, Bid Me to Live brilliant defines the malaise of the 'Lost Generation' through the feelings, moods, sensations and memories of one of America's greatest poets.'
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'Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein' by Gustav Klimt
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'My Mortal Enemy' by Willa Cather (#77)
'Through the eyes of a young girl, Nellie, we view the life of Myra Driscoll Henshawe, a legend in the Southern town where both were born. There Myra was raised in luxury, a luxury she romantically abandoned to elope with the impoverished Oswald Henshawe. We-and Nellie-meet them twenty five years later living in elegant poverty in a New York apartment frequented by singers, actors, poets-the artistic community of old New York. We-and Nellie-are dazzled by Myra's worldly, imperial manner, her charismatic presence and the devotion of her husband. It is not until ten years later, when Nellie encounters the Henshawes again-in real poverty now, living in a jerry-built West Coast hotel-that the high purpose of Myra's life, love itself, is revealed as the enemy within...'
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>103 LyzzyBee: It is a very short work. That is why I picked it up first from a row of Cathers is that university library, to see if I liked her style.
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'Ariel' By John Anster Fitzgerald
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'The Love Child' by Edith Olivier (#46)
'At thirty-two, her mother dead, Agatha Bodenham finds herself quite alone. She summons back to life the only friend she ever knew, Clarissa, the dream companion of her childhood. At first Clarissa comes by night, and then by day, gathering substance in the warmth of Agatha's obsessive love until it seems that others too can see her. See, but not touch, for Agatha has made her love child for herself alone. No man may approach her elfin creation of perfect beauty. If he does, the love which summoned her can spirit her away.'
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Illustration by Harriet Meserole
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'Love' by Elizabeth Van Arnim (#297)
'Catherine becomes aware of Christopher on her fifth visit to "The Immortal Hour", playing to empty houses at King's Cross. It is his thirty-second. He is a glorious young man with flame-coloured hair. She is the sweetest little thing in a hat. Some performances later, they are sitting side by side and all seems set for the perfect romance -- but for the small matter of age. Chris is in the first flush of manhood and Catherine is just a little bit older. For a woman in her forties, with marriage and motherhood behind her, the notion of being thought younger than her years adds an extra thrill to courtship. But there are unforeseen obstacles to such pleasures. Beneath the humour of this engaging novel, originally published in 1925, lies a sharper note, as Elizabeth Von Arnim uncovers the hypocrisy of society and the codes it forces women to ascribe to in the name of 'love'.'
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'A Roman Peasant Girl by Lord Frederick Leighton
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'A Lacquer Lady' by F Tennyson Jesse (#12)
'First published in 1929, this prodigious novel of adventure and romance matches the great tales of Kipling and Stevenson, Buchan and Maugham. Based on a true historical incident, The Lacquer Lady is set in the 1880s in the gem city of Mandalay during the last years of the opulent, decaying Kingdom of Burma. Into the Royal Palace, with its whispering gardens, its elaborate ritual, its savage violence, its intrigue, comes Fanny Moroni, the young daughter of a ne'er-do-well British merchant and a Burmese woman. Pretty, vain, impertinent, and brave--just back from a dull boarding school in Brighton--Fanny becomes the favorite of the Burmese queen, Supaya-lat. One critic observed that Fanny Moroni was a character 'good enough to take tea with Becky Sharp.' It is her dreams, 'bolder, cruder, more rapacious, more vivid' than those of other girls, that prove her ultimate undoing. Fanny's reckless love affair with Pierre Bonvoisin, a French adventurer, changes the destiny of the glittering Burmese kingdom, as well as her own.'
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Spring Day at Boscastle by Charles Ginner
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One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes (#195)
"The English village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rustling coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated. Together again after years of separation, Laura and Stephen Marshall and their daughter Victoria are forced to manage without "those anonymous caps and aprons who lived out of sight and pulled the strings." Their rambling garden refuses to be tamed, the house seems perceptibly to crumble. But alone on a hillside, as evening falls, Laura comes to see what it would have meant if the war had been lost, and looks to the future with a new hope and optimism. This subtle, finely wrought novel presents a memorable portrait of the aftermath of war, its effect upon a marriage, and the gradual but significant change in the nature of English middle-class life."
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I have the newer Virago cover, which, for some reason, I don't like at all (but love the book!):
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I don't care for the modern cover, but am happy that Virago still have the book in print.
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Bank Holiday by William Strang
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The Misses Mallet by E H Young (#141)
'There are four Misses Mallett. Caroline and Sophia are large, jolly spinsters with recollections of a past glamour to sustain them as the years slip by. Then there is beautiful Rose. Much younger than her stepsisters, she calmly awaits the event -- or the man -- that will take her away from their life of small social successes in the city of Radstowe. But she is independent and fastidious; no man, not even the eligible Francis Sales, can entirely capture her heart. The fourth Miss Mallett is Henrietta, who comes to share the conventional home of her three aunts. With her Aunt Rose's beauty and her own willful spirit, she devotes her energies to eluding spinsterhood. Encountering Francis (no longer so eligible), she falls under his spell. As Rose and Henrietta both circle 'round Francis, they are forced to decide between sense and sensibility -- and each of them makes the perfect choice.'
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'The Tarry Stone, Cookham' by Stanley Spencer
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'The Skin Chairs' by Barbara Comyns (#224)
'Her father dies and the ten-year-old Frances, her mother and assorted siblings are taken under the wing of their horsey relations, led by bullying Aunt Lawrence. Their new home is small and they can't afford a maid. Mother occasionally dabs at the furniture with a duster and sister Polly rules the kitchen. Living in patronised poverty isn't much fun but Frances makes friends with Mrs. Alexander who has a collection of monkeys and a yellow motor car, and the young widow, Vanda, who is friendly if the Major isn't due to call. But times do change and one day Aunt Lawrence gets her come-uppance and Frances goes to live in the house with 'the skin chairs'.'
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>118 BeyondEdenRock: I love the perspective of that painting--so unusual, and yet so familiar at the same time.
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'I usually prefer the quiet, tortured paintings of Augustus John’s sister, Gwen, but this portrait of his is irresistible. The subject is plainly a load of infinitely seductive and dangerous trouble–even the skies behind her are stormy–and her pose, in her loose, creamy negligee, is as challenging as her expression. And I love the way she’s painted, the boldness of the palette and the brushstrokes, plus the sheer confidence that matches the mood of the sitter. It looks to me as if painter and subject were very well matched.'
'The Marchesa Casati by Augustus John
(Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada)
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'Miss Herbert: Suburban Wife' by Christina Stead (#97)
'Eleanor Herbert Brent is a beautiful woman - tall, blond, athletic - a woman with 'proper' goals, believing in respectability, in her desire to be a wife and mother in the 'dear old-fashioned way'. Yet at the same time sexuality forms her personality and as a young English graduate on the loose in London, she savours the capacity to excite - and sleep with - every man she meets. She experiences everything: a restless, promiscuous youth, a wholesome suburban marriage, grass widowhood in the Second World War, and life on the fringes of literary London in the forties and fifties. Only one thing remains forever beyond her reach: the experience of real love; this and this only could transform Miss Herbert into the passionate woman she really is.'
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The recent Winifred Holtby covers were in that style, if not actual railway posters (They may have been, I'm not sure as I don't own those editions).
>123 BeyondEdenRock: Ooh, I own this! Maybe I will read it for this month's challenge!
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I love the current cover, but it doesn't match as well with the book as that poster:
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'The Other Room' by Vanessa Bell (#32)
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'The Return of the Soldier' by Rebecca West (#32)
'The soldier returns from the front to find three women from his past. There's Kitty, his wife, with her cool, moonlight beauty, and his devoted cousin Jenny, who never quite admits her love for him.
But it's Margaret whom the shell-shocked Chris remembers. Margaret, his first love of fifteen years before. His cousin he recalls only as a childhood playmate, and his wife not at all. The women have a choice: to leave him as he is, or to 'cure' him.'
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'Ill Omen: Girl in the East Wind with Ravens Crossing the Moon' by Frances MacDonald MacNair
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'Open the Door!' by Catherine Carswell (#201)
'Joanna Bannerman, capricious, selfish and warm-hearted, passionately seeks life and "loveliness". And the bustling streets of Glasgow in the late 1800s seem to promise much more for her than the solidity of the Evangelical background she's known. Her studies at the School of Art open up new horizons - of independence and of love - and Joanna reaches for them all. First published in 1920, this roman à clef is the story of her awakening: an enlightened novel, it powerfully evokes the image of a woman ensnared by, and yet ultimately released through, her own capacity for emotion.'
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>130 BeyondEdenRock: Agree!
Both books are matched well with their cover art!
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'Miss Ffrench Mullan' by Cecil Ffrench Salkeld
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'Mary Lavelle' by Kate O'Brien (#139)
'The year is 1922 and Mary Lavelle, an Irish girl of great beauty, leaves her family and fiance in Mellick to become a governess in Spain. She goes to seek a small space: a hiatus between her life's two accepted phases--as daughter and as wife. Mary's charges are three young girls who live with their parents in a small fishing village. There is pretty 18-year-old Pilar, being groomed by her mother for suitable marriage; Nieves, whose dream at fifteen is to become an English boy at Eton; and their young sister, grey-eyed, intelligent Milagros. Little by little Mary loses her heart to the landscape, the light, the enchantment of Spain. And when she meets Juanito, the brilliant but married son of the household, she loses her heart to him too ...'
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'Portrait of Madame Paul Poirson' by John Singer Sargent
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'House of Mirth' by Edith Wharton (#331)
'Set in the opulent houses and glittering resorts of New York's fashionable society, this is the story of Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, accepted by "old money", courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But, as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious: she needs a husband to preserve her social and financial standing, to maintain her in the luxury she craves. Many men have sought her, but something - fastidiousness, an uncomfortable intelligence or some deep-seated integrity - prevents her from making a "suitable" match. Watched by the admiring but impoverished Lawrence Selden, she struggles courageously with the difficulties caused by the growing threat of poverty and her contempt for hypocrisy - a contempt which compromises her position as an unmarried woman among "the ultra-fashionable dancing people".'
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>138 Sakerfalcon: Agreed! This is one of those cover paintings that really comes to life when released from its green frame.
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'The Boer War' by John Byam Liston Shaw
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'The Golden Arrow' by Mary Webb (#130)
'Deborah Arden lives with her parents and brother Joe in a little stone cottage high in the Shropshire hills, content to remain in the bosom of her family, living close to the countryside she loves. One day a young preacher, Stephen Southernwood, comes to their chapel.. Tall, blue-eyed and golden-haired, he inspires in Deborah a great and mystic love. He asks her to live with him in the wild hill country nearby - and she goes. But Stephen is out of harmony with the natural world. His restless, selfish spirit makes him risk all before he discovers what Deborah has always known: that to find love is to find the legendary golden arrow - the burnished gold that wounds before it can heal.'
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'Cotton lavender and quinces' by Vanessa Bell
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'Summer Will Show' by Sylvia Townsend Warner (#257)
'Sophia enjoys the freedom afforded by estrangement from her husband Frederick. A woman unused to criticism, she feels that no queen could have a more absolute sway than she, mistress of Blandamer House. Then her children die and that poise is shaken. Deciding to follow Frederick, Sophia arrives in Paris in the Spring of 1848 as barricades threaten street corners. Here she meets her husband's mistress Minna, 'magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent and interfering.' Faced with the danger and uncertainty of revolution, and the discovery of her love for Minna, Sophia's life is dramatically overturned.'
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However, I am struggling to find the actual picture it comes from so maybe you will have more luck! :D
ETA sorry it's so big...
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Illustration by Henry R Sutter
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'Sunflower' by Rebecca West (#362)
'A beautiful actress of the 1920s faces painful decisions about her lovers and her future. Star of the stage, Sunflower has everything but the attention she craves from her long-time - and married - lover, Lord Essington, a brilliant and intense man occupied with more intellectual thoughts. Eager for a more rewarding experience, Sunflower must decide whether another "great man," the Australian Francis Pitt, will offer a more traditional relationship and happiness. Written during West's own psychoanalysis and never finished, Sunflower ponders topics of the power struggle between the sexes, and a woman's freedom to determine her romantic destiny. Drawn heavily from West's own relationships with H.G. Wells and Lord Beaverbrook, this roman-a-clef gives a glimpse of the author's own struggle to find a satisfying relationship.'
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'Tables for Ladies' by Edward Hopper
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'Women Against Men' by Storm Jameson (#91)
'In these three novels, published together in England for the first time, Storm Jameson looks at three women, their relationships to men, and to other women. Beautiful Victoria Form, seen through the eyes of her childhood friend Fanny, is a famous novelist and relentless seductress: her favourite pastime is to ensnare men - and to betray women. Emily Lambton is the daughter of Sir John, owner of a shipping line. She makes a brilliant marriage to Lord Holl but falls in love with a socialist clerk, Evan - a love that is to consume her life. Lastly we meet a nameless middle-aged woman: one of the so many who have lived off men all their lives. Alone now in a shabby bedsitter, her looks gone, she reaps the bitter rewards allotted in that ancient battle between the sexes.'
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'Portrait of Hilda Carline' by Richard Carline
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The Rector's Daughter by F M Mayor (#259)
'Dedmayne Rectory is quietly decaying, its striped chintz and darkened rooms are a bastion of outmoded Victorian values. Here Mary has spent thirty-five years, devoting herself to her sister, now dead, and to her father, Canon Jocelyn. Although she is pitied by her neighbours for this muted existence, Mary is content. But when she meets Robert Herbert, Mary's ease is destroyed and years of suppressed emotion surface through her desire for him.
First published in 1924, 'The Rector's Daughter' is an impressive exploration of Mary's relationship with her father, of her need for Robert and the way in which, through each, she comes to a clearer understanding of love.'
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'Timmy' by Rita Angus
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'Bobbin Up' by Dorothy Hewett (#172)
'It is the late 1950s and the Russians launch the first Sputnik. A group of women sweat in the Jumbuck Woollen Mills in Sydney for breadline wages. The whistle blows - grime is washed from faces, hair combed, lipstick applied - and the workers emerge, women again, leaving the factory behind them. Out into the evening streets, flashing neon lights and the journey home to families and lovers.
Among them are Shirl, nineteen and four months pregnant; Dawnie, beautiful and fiercely chaste; Patty, singing in the dance halls; and Nell, an active Communist Party member. These women have their own dreams: but a common spirit binds them, and with Nell as their leader they will come together for the fight which lies ahead ...'
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I wonder what she is thinking ...
The Blue Girl by Mainie Jellett
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Two Days in Aragon by M L Farrell (Molly Keane) (#193)
"The Georgian house of Aragon stands amongst rhododendrons and scented azaleas, a testament to centuries of gracious living. Here, with their mother, their dotty Aunt Pidgie and Nan O'Neill, the family nurse, live Grania and Sylvia Fox. Wild-blooded Grania is conducting a secret affair with Nan's son, Foley, a wiley horse-breeder, whilst Sylvia who is "pretty in the right and accepted way" falls for the charms of Captain Purvis. Attending Aragon's strawberry teas, the British Army Officers can almost forget the reason for their presence in Ireland. But the days of dignified calm at Aragon are numbered, for Foley is a member of Sinn Fein ..."
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'I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow'
'Vase aux Anemones' By Marevna
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'The Solitary Summer' by Elizabeth Von Arnim (#382)
'This delightful companion to the famous Elizabeth and Her German Garden is a witty, lyrical account of a rejuvenating summer. Descriptions of magnificent larkspurs and burning nasturtiums give way to the those of cooling forest walks -- and of clambering up the mud bank with the miller is not in view. Rainy days prompt a little philanthropy, until the sun returns the gardener to the refuge of her beloved plants. Yet the months are not as solitary as she'd planned: there's the Man of Wrath to pacify and the April, May and June babies to amuse.'
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'The Gleaner' by Jules Breton
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'O Pioneers!' by Willa Cather (#127)
'Alexandra is the eldest child of the Bergsons, a ship-building family from Norway who have come to the American Midwest to wrest their living from another kind of frontier. Alexandra is driven by two great forces:her fierce protective love for her young brother Emil, and her deep love of the land. When her father dies, worn out by disease and debt, it is she who becomes head of the family and begins the long, hard process of taming the country, forcing it to yield wheat and corn where only the grass and wildflowers had grown since time began. Through the life, hopes, successes - and failures - of this magnificent woman we learn the story of all the immigrants who came to carve out new homes for themselves, who struggled against ignorance, drought, storm, poverty and came to love and understand the earth until it rewarded them with richness beyond measure.'
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This cover is taken from the central panel of a triptych
The Pioneer by Frederick McCubbin
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'The Roaring Nineties' by Kathleen Susannah Prichard (#120)
'In the spring of 1892 gold fever swept Western Australia like a forest fire. Prospectors, miners, storekeepers, brothel keepers and speculators swarmed over the vast, unknown back-country of the West, prepared to risk all for the elusive chance of gold. Sally Gough, tough and determined, is one of the many women who braved the hardship and danger of the frontier goldfields of the West. With Sally and her English husband Fitz-Morris, we meet their fellow prospectors, their wives, mistresses and children; we meet the Aborigines whose tribal homelands the miners have invaded and encounter the raw and magnificent outback, doomed to civilisation by the discovery of gold. This is an enthralling story of friendship and love, of success and failure, of violence and death, of tremendous riches and terrible poverty: a classic tale of pioneering Australia.'
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'A Summer Morning' by Rupert Bunny
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'The Three Miss Kings' by Ada Cambridge (#244)
'The three Miss Kings - Elizabeth, Eleanor and Patty - were brought up in a remote seaside settlement in Victoria, Australia, their father a mysterious man of "preposterous eccentricity", their late mother a dignified, accomplished women who instilled in the girls and appreciate of "spiritual and intellectual aspirations" which compensates for their lack of worldly experience. Such virtues serve the sisters well when, on the death of their father, they begin a new life in Melbourne. Under the watchful eye of one of society's more respectable patrons, they learn quickly about "life, and love, and trouble, and etiquette among city folks" - to emerge radiant in their succession to both marriage and gentility.'
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Illustration by Helen Dryden
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'Thank Heaven Fasting' by E M Delafield (#291)
'When in the company of a young man a dutiful daughter should immediately assume an air of fresh, sparkling enjoyment. She should not speak of "being friends" with him--a young man is either eligible or he is not--and never, but never, should she get herself talked about, for a young girl who does so is doomed. "Men may dance with her, or flirt with her, but they don't propose." It would be quite a coup for a girl to find a husband during her first season, but if, God forbid, three seasons pass without success, she must join the ranks of those sad women who are a great embarrassment to society and, above all, to their disappointed mothers . . . With such thoughts in mind, how can Monica fail to look forward to her first ball?'
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'Summertime' by Edward Hopper
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'The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty (#159)
'For a long time Judge McKelva was seen as a reassuring figure by the many who knew and liked him. They looked at him, with his wife Becky and daughter Laurel, and they felt good: that was how well-bred people in Mount Salus, Mississippi, ought to be. When, ten years after his wife's death, the Judge marries silly young Fay everyone is disconcerted: but a lonely old man can be allowed at least one folly. For Laurel, however, her father's remarriage is a difficult and puzzling betrayal. Years later, circumstance brings Laurel back from Chicago: first to New Orleans, then to Mount Salus and the old house of her childhood. It is only here, alone with her memories, that Laurel can finally come to an understanding of the past, herself and her parents.'
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'The Misses Vickers' by John Singer Sargent
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'The Sheltered Life' by Ellen Glasgow (#61)
'Washington Street, Queensborough was once occupied by the great Virginian families - now dispersed by the advent of the industrial age in this small Southern town. Only the Birdsongs and the Archbalds remain and it is Eva Birdsong, a celebrated nineties beauty, who holds them there; their hearts captured by her deep blue eyes, her rippling bronze hair and her dedication to the old romantic ideals. Passionately in love with the idea of love itself, Eva is resolutely married to the all-too-human George. Their love story is seen through the eyes of old General Archbald, a man in his seventies, with his own longings and regrets, and through the eyes of his granddaughter, Jenny Blair, who grows to womanhood in the shadow of old memories, to shatter finally the illusory peace of so many crumbling lives.'
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'The Student' by Gwen John
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'The Beth Book' by Sarah Grand (#20)
'Sarah Grand is the most important representative of those British Women Novelists who, in the las decades of the nineteenth century, demanded a new relationship between the sexes, new social and sexual freedom for women. These were the New Women, and Sarah Grand, who coined that famous phrase, wrote in The Beth Book the story of all Victorian women who rebelled against the conventions imposed upon their sex. The Beth Book, first published in 1897 and was closely modlled on the author's own life. It recounts in detail the life, loves and aspirations of its heroine, Beth, a bright, inquisitive, loving child who grows to maturity first in a remote town on the west coast of Ireland and then in Yorkshire -- provincial societies which vividly come to life in these pages. Beth experiences all the frustrations and restrictions imposed on Victorian middle-class girls. Education is denied her. Intellectual stimulation, personal freedom, independent work, sexual gratification -- all are taboo. Beth's only future is marriage and her corrupt and dissolute husband exercises all the rights with which the Victorian male was divinely -- and legally -- endowed. But Beth is not defeated: how she escapes to a room of her own, a career of her own and to a man who loves her for the New Woman she becomes, is engrossingly told in this splendid and robust autobiographical novel, a classic of Victorian age.'
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“For me, it’s like a prayer. Or a meditation. I found that, after looking at it — and other Shoreham paintings — I had a much deeper emotional reaction to the landscape (admittedly, it was a bewitching evening last night — still, warm and pink and gold). Palmer’s intensity of devotion is catching. My mum loved swimming in lakes and rivers, as if to immerse herself deeper in the landscape, and this is the effect he has on me. I feel fully infused with the beauty of the natural world when I look at this apple tree.”
'In a Shoreham Garden' by Samuel Palmer
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'The Corn King and the Spring Queen' by Naomi Mitchison (#123)
'It is the year 228 BC. In Marob, a village on the shores of the Black Sea, the beautiful young witch Erif Der is compelled by her father to marry his rival Tarrik the Corn King, thus becoming the Spring Queen, patroness of the Harvest and of the Plowing Eve. Ruled by her father's will, she must use her magic spells to break Tarrik's formidable powers . . .
But one stormy night Tarrik rescues from shipwreck Sphaeros the Stoic, an Hellenic, philosopher. Sphaeros, in turn, saves Tarrik from death an breaks the enchantment that has bound him. So begins for Tarrik a Quest -- a fabulous voyage of discovery which will bring him new knowledge and which will unite him to his Spring Queen.
We travel enthralled over 2000 years into the past, to encounter ancient civilisations of tenderness and brutality, beauty and sheer magic which as the story unfolds, become profoundly and radiantly alive.'
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'Head of a Girl' by Ambrose McEvoy
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'The Lost Traveller' by Antonia White (#13)
'When Clara returns home from the convent of her childhood to begin life at a local girls' school, she is at a loss: although she has comparative freedom, she misses the discipline the nuns imposed and worries about keeping her faith in a secular world. Against the background of the First World War, Clara experiences the confusions of adolescence - its promise, its threat of change. She longs for love, yet fears it, and wonders what the future will hold. Then tragedy strikes and her childhood haltingly comes to an end as she realizes that neither parents nor her faith can help her.'
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‘Portrait of Marie Botkine’ by Odilon Redon
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'The Birds Fall Down' by Rebecca West (#235)
'One afternoon, in an early summer of this century, eighteen-year-old Laura Rowan sits on the garden steps of her house embroidering a handkerchief. She overhears a conversation between her father, an English Member of Parliament, and her mother, Tania, the daughter of an exiled Russian royalist. Tania's decision to take Laura to Paris to visit her grandfather, Count Nikolai Diakonov, means that Laura will unwittingly become a witness to the momentous events leading up to the Russian Revolution . . .
Through a vivid canvas layered with intrigue, conspiracy and murder, Rebecca West has created a story that is at once a family saga, a political thriller, a philosophical drama and a fine historical novel. This intricate work, first published in 1966, has also been a successful BBC TV serial.'
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Between doing this and the themed reads I have far more books that I want to read now than is viable.
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'The Cook' by Vanessa Bell
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'Tell Me a Riddle' by Tillie Olsen (#363)
'Tillie Olsen earned a permanent place in American literature on the strength of a single book, 'Tell me a Riddle', published in 1962. This collection of four stories was widely hailed as a work of genius, in which the voices of ordinary Americans, black and white, male and female, were given their own rhythms and forms of expression.'
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'Margaret' by Philip Hermogenes Calderon
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'Diana of the Crossways' by George Meredith (#30)
'In the fashionable political and literary world of mid-Victorian England, Diana Merion takes London by storm. A woman of exceptional spirit, beautiful, witty, she is without means and so must marry. Diana accepts the first man to present himself and embarks on a marriage which stifles her genius. For Diana was born to shine. She cannot love a man on less than equal terms and her dramatic personality demands personal freedom. In a world hostile to any break with conventions, Diana's escape from her husband, her ambitious career and her love for the rising young politician Dacier, brings down upon her the full fury of her peers... '
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'Fleurs de lys' by Henri Jean Guillaume Martin
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'Hester Lilly and Other Stories' by Elizabeth Taylor (#350)
'The title story shows a headmaster's elegant wife suffering torments of jealousy when his gawky young cousin comes to live with them. Why is it that her sophistication seems unable to compete with Hester's naivety? Elsewhere we see the mute agonies of a long marriage; the emotional deserts lurking in the English countryside; an old ruffian's sense of suffocation in a genteel community for the blind; or the freshness and oddity of children's perceptions. In this, her first collection of short stories, Elizabeth Taylor charts the territory she so triumphantly claimed as her own.'
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'La femme à la cigarette' by Émile Bernard
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'The Other Woman' by Colette (#383)
'The colours and scents of the Parisian world provide the backdrop to Colette's subtle and ruthless observations on the loss of childhood magic, the insecurity of solitude and the stresses and strains between husbands, wives, lovers and mistresses. With their emphasis on the unexpected, telling detail, the scenes these short stories invite us to witness include the blooming of one dutiful wife under the furtive touch of a lover and the immodest innocence restored to another by a simple mask and concealing costume. Reverberating with wit and psychological acuity, The Other Woman is a supreme example of Colette's ironic understanding of human beings at their most intense and vulnerable moments.'
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'Dreaming in the Street' by Charles Blackman
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'Occasion for Loving' by Nadine Gordimer (#129)
'In a large old fashioned house in the heart of Johannesburg live Jessie Stilwell and her husband Tom, South African liberals determined to live 'decent' lives in their divided country. To this comfortable home their friend Boaz Davis brings Ann, his English wife. Everyone knows the punishment for an affair between a black man and a white woman in South Africa: imprisonment. But Ann is in search of an 'African adventure'. She falls in love with the black artist Gideon Shibalo, and in a world where love is subject to law she learns the far reaching, human consequences of the 'wrong' occasion for loving.'
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'A Bloomsbury Family' by William Orpen
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'Told by an Idiot' by Rose Macaulay (#105)
'It is shortly before Christmas in the year 1879, the forty-second year of Queen Victoria's reign, when the curtain rises on the Garden family: on Mr Garden, a clergyman of many denominations, about to lose his faith for the umpteenth time, on his selfless, devoted wife - and on their six children, about to be launched on the adult world. There is Victoria, a Pre-Raphaelite beauty intent on marriage; Maurice, shaking his fist at the injustices of the world; Stanley, a follower of Ruskin and Morris, doing good as radical fashion dictates; Irving, a lusty young capitalist, and Una, born for happy marriage and maternity. All are watched from the side-lines by their sister Rome. Detached, intelligent, urbane, she observes three generations of her family strut and fret their hour upon the stage. To her their sound and fury signify nothing - but to us the memory of Rome's one brief love affair strikes the final note of truth, defiantly affirming that it is better to have loved and lost...'
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'The Opera Cloak' by William Strang
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'Family History' by Vita Sackville-West (#234)
'Old Mr. Jarrold is proud of the coal which has made his fortune; he is also proud of his daughter-in-law Evelyn, who has kept close to the heels of the family since her husband's death in the First World War, a caring mother to her son, Dan. At thirty-nine Evelyn is a woman of irreproachable conduct who parties and plays cards with the best of society. Then she meets Miles Vane-Merrick, a rising Labour politician, fifteen years her junior. Theirs is a love affair between people of different temperaments and different eras, for Evelyn knows only the social mores of her own circle and with Miles these securities dissolve. In this finely balanced novel, first published in 1932, the uncertainties of one relationship mirror the wider uncertainties of the 1930's, producing an elegant portrait of a country on the brink of change.'
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'La Bionda del Balcone' by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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'Lady Audley's Secret' by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (#186)
'Sir Michael Audley is captivated by his young and beautiful second wife. She has made a most advantageous match: once a governess, she is now mistress of Audley Court, a splendid and rambling mansion and envy of the neighborhood. Those who meet Lady Audley are fascinated by her, most particularly her husband's nephew, Robert. But his fascination begins to disturb him. For as he investigates the mysterious disappearance of his friend, George Talboys, he discovers that Lady Audley's beguiling charm masks the cold heart of a ruthless woman.
This accomplished intrigue, first published in 1862, is Mary Braddon's most celebrated work. Once of the greatest 'sensation' novels ever written. Lady Audley's Secret shock the Victorian public with its revelations of horror at the very heart of respectable society and its most respectable women.'