Showing results for "stephen arkin"

Introduction and Notes by Professor Stephen Arkin, San Francisco University.'Young women who have no economic or political power must attend to the serious business of contriving material security'. Jane Austen's sardonic humour lays bare the stratagems, the hypocrisy and the poignancy inherent in the struggle of two very different sisters to achieve respectability.Sense and Sensibility is a delightful comedy of manners in which the sisters Elinor ...

“She was feeling, thinking, trembling about everything; agitated, happy, miserable, infinitely obliged, absolutely angry.”A poor relation to the Bertrams of Mansfield Park, young Fanny Price is sent off by her family to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle. Mistreated by her cousins and another aunt, Fanny’s quiet life on the estate is transformed with the arrival of Henry and Mary Crawford. The fashionable brother and sister duo are charming and witty, but do they have the best in...

There are few more iconic love stories than Georgian-era romance PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, arguably Jane Austen’s most beloved and influential work.Mrs Bennet wants nothing more than to secure good marriages for her five daughters, and so is thrilled when a wealthy young gentleman rents a nearby manor. When middle daughter Elizabeth is first introduced to eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she finds him cold and arrogant - and he seems unimpressed by her quick-witted charm. However, a...

“The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.”Abandoned as a baby, hunchbacked Quasimodo grows up in the shadows of the bells of Notre-Dame. His simple life is shattered when his guardian, Archdeacon Frollo, orders him to kidnap the young Romani dancer Esmeralda, the focus of Frollo’s obsessive lust. Failing to capture the girl, Quasimodo becomes entangled in a decades-old web of lies, stretching from the Court of Miracles to the cou...

"I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon. I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing."Orphaned as a child, Jane is sent to live with her wealthy aunt at Gateshead. After a traumatic event in the room where her uncle died (did his ghost really appear?), she is sent away to boarding school. Eight years later, Jane leaves her post as a teacher at that same school and sets off on a new adv...

“He says, no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.”Imagine getting the chance to have everything you’ve ever wanted. For young Pip, an orphan working at a forge, that chance comes in the form of a mysterious fortune that allows him to rise through the ranks of society and become a gentleman. Along the way he loses his sense of self, casting aside the people who care about him because of their lower-clas...

Beautiful Tess Durbeyfield lives a simple life helping her mother and father earn a living on their farm in a dying rural community. When her father discovers there may be connection between their family and wealthy d'Urbervilles, Tess is sent to work at the d'Urberville estate in a desperate attempt to "claim kin" and secure some of their fortune. However, innocent Tess is unprepared to meet the unscrupulous and lustful Alex d'Urberville, who seduces her and sends her home a ruined woman....

Anna Karenina is a rich and masterful story of love in its many facets and complexities: honest, corrupted, nourishing, destructive. Set against the backdrop of luxury and the Russian upper class, it is the story of a passionate love affair doomed from the beginning between beautiful Anna, married and a mother well placed in Russian high society, and cavalry officer Count Vronsky. Called "one of the greatest love stories in world literature" by Vladimir Nabokov, this epic novel is a must-r...

"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds is a twist on Victorian invasion literature, telling the first-ever story of a Martian invasion of Earth.A mysterious alien cylinder lands just outside the town of Surrey, filled with grotesque ...

Shocking its middle-class Victorian readers when it was first published in 1838, Oliver Twist tells the story of a young orphan that’s cruelly mistreated from birth and falls in with a gang of thieves. The seedy underbelly of London casts a long shadow over Oliver’s innate optimism, but never quite manages to dim his light as he dodges all obstacles thrown in his path.A champion of social reform, Dickens believed that a novel should be more than just entertainment. Oliver’s innocen...

Discovering an ancient parchment that describes a path into the Earth’s core, Professor Otto Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel find their way underground through the mouth of a dormant volcano in Iceland. The intrepid explorers encounter subterranean rivers, giant mushrooms, even dinosaurs… but will they make it back home alive or perish beneath the surface?Grounded in the latest scientific discoveries of the Victorian era, A Journey into the Center of the Earth dives into the geologi...

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”Considered to be Charles Dickens’ most autobiographical work, David Copperfield begins at the beginning — with the main character describing the events surrounding his birth (as far as he knows). David’s journey of growing up and finding his place in the world is filled with setbacks and harsh realizations, told from the perspective of a man who has ...