Showing results for "fiona wethermere"

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, Henry Handel Richardson's monumental trilogy—Australia Felix, The Way Home, and Ultima Thule—traces the rise and disintegration of Richard Mahony, an Irish-born doctor seeking prosperity and dignity in nineteenth-century colonial Australia. Moving from the goldfields of Ballarat to Britain and back again, the work combines social realism with penetrating psychological analysis. Its style is expansive, ironic, and unsparing, placing it among the great colonia...

Joseph Rickaby's Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law is a lucid neo-scholastic treatise that organizes moral inquiry around human action, obligation, conscience, rights, and the rational foundations of law. Written in the disciplined manner of a philosophical manual, it combines analytic precision with a distinctly Thomistic confidence that moral truths are intelligible through reason. Its context is the late nineteenth-century revival of scholastic philosophy, where class...

Grace James's Japanese Fairy Tales gathers traditional narratives of enchantment, moral testing, transformation, and wonder, presenting such figures as grateful animals, brave children, spirits, demons, and divine beings within a lucid Edwardian prose style. The collection belongs to the early twentieth-century Anglophone fascination with Japanese art and literature, yet its tales retain the compact elegance, symbolic clarity, and ethical resonance of oral folklore. Illustrated in many edi...

The Gentle Art of Making Enemies is James McNeill Whistler's brilliant, combative anthology of letters, pamphlets, reviews, legal testimony, and public rejoinders, assembled as both self-defense and aesthetic manifesto. Published in 1890, it transforms controversy into literary performance: urbane, epigrammatic, and devastatingly ironic. At its center lies Whistler's struggle against Victorian moralism and critical philistinism, especially the notorious Ruskin trial, through which he asser...

William Canniff's History of the Settlement of Upper Canada (Ontario), with Special Reference to the Bay Quinté is a foundational nineteenth-century local history, tracing the transformation of the region from Indigenous homelands and imperial frontier to Loyalist settlement and colonial society. Written in a documentary, anecdotal, and commemorative style, it gathers petitions, family recollections, military memories, and civic records into a narrative shaped by Victorian historical patri...

Mogreb-el-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco is a vivid fin-de-siècle travel narrative whose title evokes Morocco as the "farthest West" of the Islamic world. Combining itinerary, ethnographic observation, historical reflection, and equestrian adventure, the book records desert roads, market towns, tribal politics, religious customs, and the charged encounter between European curiosity and North African autonomy. Its prose is richly pictorial, ironic, and unsentimental, standing apart from conven...

Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest is a searching psychological novel of artistic aspiration, erotic obsession, and moral disintegration, set amid the cosmopolitan musical culture of late nineteenth-century Leipzig. With a realist's patience and a naturalist's severity, Richardson follows the earnest English student Maurice Guest as his ambitions are gradually consumed by his attachment to the volatile Louise Dufrayer. The novel's dense interiority, social observation, and musical atm...

Mary Brunton's Self-Control (1811) is a courtship novel of moral trial, tracing Laura Montreville's effort to preserve religious principle and personal integrity against the seductive, coercive attentions of Colonel Hargrave. Written in a heightened yet disciplined sentimental style, the novel blends psychological introspection, melodramatic adventure, and evangelical moral seriousness. It belongs to the post-Austen, anti-Jacobin and Scottish moral-fictional milieu, engaging the era's deba...

William Ernest Henley's Poems gathers the work of a late-Victorian lyric poet whose compressed, muscular lines resist both sentimentality and despair. The volume includes the famous "Invictus," but its force extends beyond that emblem of stoic defiance: hospital sketches, sea pieces, urban impressions, and meditations on courage reveal a writer alert to bodily suffering and modern nervous energy. Henley's style is vigorous, epigrammatic, and musical, standing at a crossroads between Victor...

Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem (1780) is a sparkling comedy of manners that reimagines the Restoration legacy for the late eighteenth-century stage. Centered on Letitia Hardy's ingenious effort to win the affection of her indifferent fiancé, Doricourt, the play combines romantic intrigue, masquerade, and social satire with a distinctly proto-feminist intelligence. Its wit exposes the rituals of courtship, fashion, and polite society while granting unusual agency to its heroine. Cowl...

The Misses Mallett, first published as The Bridge Dividing, is a subtle comedy of manners and a penetrating study of female inheritance, desire, and renunciation. Set in Young's fictional Radstowe, recognizably modeled on Bristol, the novel follows the Mallett women across generations, contrasting settled spinsterhood with youthful longing and the disruptive claims of love. Its style is poised, ironic, and psychologically exact, placing it within the English tradition of domestic realism w...

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things is Lafcadio Hearn's haunting collection of Japanese ghost tales, supernatural legends, and brief cultural studies, first published in 1904. Drawing on oral tradition, Buddhist-inflected folklore, and classical Japanese narrative modes, the book presents stories of revenants, spectral lovers, uncanny transformations, and moral retribution with a restrained, lyrical style. Hearn's prose is elegant and atmospheric, less sensational than meditativ...