Download or read book How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life written by Mameve Medwed and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do a chamber pot, a famous poet, a family feud, and a long-ago suitor all have in common? Elizabeth Barrett Browning might have written about the length and breadth of love, but Abby Randolph has given up on all that, preferring to spend her time between her cluttered "needs work" apartment and an overcrowded antiques mart optimistically named Objects of Desire. Yet Abby can't help but wonder what happened to her earlier passionate self . . . Then the Antiques Roadshow comes to town, and Abby joins thousands of Boston's hopefuls at the crack of dawn, artifact in hand. But there, among the carousel horses and bedraggled stuffed animals, Abby's rather squalid piece of porcelain gets the star treatment. And from the moment the show airs, everything changes—friendships, her career, love affairs, even the way she views herself and others—as life comes rushing back at Abby Randolph full force.
Download or read book Two Way Mirror The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning written by Fiona Sampson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2022 Plutarch Award Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography A Washington Post Best Book of 2021 “An elegant act of rehabilitation.”—New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice A "nuanced and insightful" (New Statesman) portrait of Britain’s most famous female poet, a woman who invented herself and defied her times. "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." With these words, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has come down to us as a romantic heroine, a recluse controlled by a domineering father and often overshadowed by her husband, Robert Browning. But behind the melodrama lies a thoroughly modern figure whose extraordinary life is an electrifying study in self-invention. Born in 1806, Barrett Browning lived in an age when women could not attend a university, own property after marriage, or vote. And yet she seized control of her private income, defied chronic illness and disability, became an advocate for the revolutionary Italy to which she eloped, and changed the course of cultural history. Her late-in-life verse novel masterpiece, Aurora Leigh, reveals both the brilliance and originality of her mind, as well as the challenges of being a woman writer in the Victorian era. A feminist icon, high-profile activist for the abolition of slavery, and international literary superstar, Barrett Browning inspired writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. Two-Way Mirror is the first biography of Barrett Browning in more than three decades. With unique access to the poet’s abundant correspondence, “astute, thoughtful, and wide-ranging guide” (Times [UK]) Fiona Sampson holds up a mirror to the woman, her art, and the art of biography itself.
Download or read book Minus Me written by Mameve Medwed and published by Crooked Lane Books. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Her life turned upside down by a grim diagnosis, a small-town Maine woman sets about writing a "How To" life manual for her handsome yet hapless husband in a novel Elinor Lipman (Good Riddance, On Turpentine Lane) calls "smart, funny-quirky, and so very satisfying." Annie and her devoted but comically incompetent childhood sweetheart Sam are the owners and operators of Annie's, a gourmet sandwich shop, home to the legendary Paul Bunyan Special Sandwich--their "nutritionally challenged continual source of income and marital harmony and local fame." But into their mostly charmed marriage comes the scary medical diagnosis for Annie--and the overwhelming challenge of finding a way to help Sam go on without her. Annie decides to leave Sam step-by-step instructions for a future without her, and considers her own replacement in his heart and their bed.Her best-laid plans grind to a halt with the unexpected appearance of Ursula, Annie's Manhattan diva of a mother, who brings her own brand of chaos and disruption into their lives. Minus Me is a poignant and hilarious novel about the bonds of marriage, the burdens of maternal love, and the courage to face mortality, "with an ending readers will cherish (Caroline Leavitt, Pictures of You)." "Medwed's lovely novel of marriage, motherhood, love and loss is so real that at times it feels like non-fiction. It's a timely reminder that in the worst of times, we sometimes rediscover the very best of ourselves." --Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of A Spark of Light.
Download or read book Host Family written by Mameve Medwed and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daisy and Henry have been married for 20 years, and for all that time they have served as host families for international students coming to study at Harvard. So Daisy should have seen it coming when Henry dumps her for the extremely French Giselle.
Download or read book Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad written by Bee Rowlatt and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2010-02-04 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A London mum and Iraqi teacher should have nothing in common. Yet now, despite their differences, they're the firmest of friends . . . Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad by Bee Rowlatt and May Witwit is a touching and poignant portrait of an unlikely friendship. Would you brave gun-toting militias for a cut and blow dry? May's a tough-talking, hard-smoking, lecturer in English. She's also an Iraqi from a Sunni-Shi'ite background living in Baghdad, dodging bullets before breakfast, bargaining for high heels in bombed-out bazaars and battling through blockades to reach her class of Jane Austen-studying girls. Bee, on the other hand, is a London mum of three, busy fighting off PTA meetings and chicken pox, dealing with dead cats and generally juggling work and family while squabbling with her globe-trotting husband over the socks he leaves lying around the house. They should have nothing in common. But when a simple email brings them together, they discover a friendship that overcomes all their differences of culture, religion and age. Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad is the story of two women who share laughter and tears, and swap their confidences, dreams and fears. And, between the grenades, the gossip, the jokes and the secrets, they also hatch an ingenious plan to help May escape the bombings of Baghdad . . . Bee Rowlatt is a former show-girl turned BBC World Service journalist. A mother of three and would-be do-gooder, she can find keeping her career going while caring for her three daughters (and husband) pretty tough, even in leafy North London. May Witwit is an Iraqi expert in Chaucer and sender of emails depicting kittens in fancy dress. She is prepared to face every hazard imaginable to make that all-important hairdresser's appointment.
Download or read book Dared And Done written by Julia Markus and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Riveting and brilliant work of biography. The story of two great English poets, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, whose work was immediately recognized and adored by their contemporaries, whose courtship ranks with the great love stories of all time -- and in whose marriage romance was not merely sustained but intensified. We enter their story through the sealed Victorian world of the Barretts of Wimpole Street: Elizabeth, at thirty-nine, a poet of international fame, a child prodigy who had grown to be a middle-aged spinster, a woman for whom romantic love seemed not to be possible, confined by illness, morphine, and the tyranny of her father, scion of rich Jamaican slaveholders, rum and sugar traders. It is to this fortress that Robert Browning, already an admired young poet and playwright, already a devotee of Elizabeth's, lays siege. ("I love your verses," he had written Elizabeth in his first letter to her, long before they met. "I love your verses with all my heart -- and I love you too.") And miraculously Elizabeth let life in. Julia Markus chronicles their extraordinary courtship, their marriage in secret (Browning to Elizabeth: "How you have dared and done all this ... for my only sake?"), and their radiant honeymoon in Italy. Markus shows us how the political events of the times inspired the great dramatic monologues of Robert's middle years and how Italy's stormy reunification inspired Elizabeth's later work. We come to see Elizabeth as an artist with a fierce and final confidence in poetry and its effect on the poets' lives. We see husband and wife celebrate the birth of their son, Robert Wiedemann "Pen" Barrett Browning (Browning to her sisters: "I sate by [Elizabeth] as much as I was allowed, and I shall never forget what I saw, tho' I cannot speak about it"). We see them among their artist/writer friends: in London with Tennyson, Thackeray, Rossetti, and others; in Rome with William Story, the American lawyer, poet, sculptor; with Harriet Hosmer, the stonecutter, who was one of the models for Aurora Leigh; with Charlotte Cushman, the American actress, who held readings of Elizabeth's novel in verse. We see Elizabeth in Paris meeting her heroine George Sand, whose society of socialists and theatrical types Robert described as "ragged Red." We come to understand Elizabeth's dependence on the ever-present drug in her life ("I should not be alive except by help of my morphine") and her constant battle with depression. And we see Elizabeth, encouraged by a woman with whom she was infatuated, move from interest to obsession with spiritualism, a cause that became the only source of serious dissension between the Brownings. We follow the course of their rich marriage, from the beginning when each saw the other as a brilliant poet, a compassionate and strangely similar heart, through the years in which they discovered each other's differences, each remaining a complex and thrilling human being to the other. To tell their story, Markus for the first time makes use of much of Elizabeth's unpublished correspondence, amid a wealth of other documents. She delves fully into the Brownings' Creole background and shows how it affected their lives and their work (Elizabeth was the first of the Jamaican Barretts to be born in England in many generations). Brilliantly interweaving the Brownings' own words with her authentic and perceptive narrative, Julia Markus brings these two great poets -- their marriage, their work, their times -- alive as never before.
Download or read book The Fate of Fenella written by and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Shaggy Muses written by Maureen Adams and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2009-02-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “You’ll call this sentimental–perhaps–but then a dog somehow represents the private side of life, the play side,” Virginia Woolf confessed to a friend. And it is this private, playful side, the richness and power of the bond between five great women writers and their dogs, that Maureen Adams celebrates in this deeply engaging book. In Shaggy Muses, we visit Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush, the golden Cocker Spaniel who danced the poet away from death, back to life and human love. We roam the wild Yorkshire moors with Emily Brontë, whose fierce Mastiff mix, Keeper, provided a safe and loving outlet for the writer’s equally fierce spirit. We enter the creative sanctum of Emily Dickinson, which she shared only with Carlo, the gentle, giant Newfoundland who soothed her emotional terrors. We mingle with Edith Wharton, whose ever-faithful Pekes warmed her lonely heart during her restless travels among Europe and America’ s social and intellectual elite. We are privileged guests in the fragile universe of Virginia Woolf, who depended for emotional support and sanity not only on her human loved ones but also on her dogs, especially Pinka–a gift from her lover, Vita Sackville-West–a black Cocker Spaniel who became a strong, bright thread in the fabric of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s life together. Based on diaries, letters, and other contemporary accounts–and featuring many illustrations of the writers and their dogs– these five miniature biographies allow us unparalleled intimacy with women of genius in their hours of domestic ease and inner vulnerability. Shaggy Muses also enchants us with a pack of new friends: Flush, Keeper, Carlo, Foxy, Linky, Grizzle, Pinka, and all the other devoted canines who loved and served these great writers.
Download or read book Victorian Short Stories written by Elizabeth Gaskell and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, attitudes about love, marriage, and gender roles began to undergo a radical shift. The five stories collected in this volume, written by literary luminaries such as Henry James, Walter Besant, and Thomas Hardy, expertly capture this period of transition.
Download or read book Of Men and Their Mothers written by Mameve Medwed and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All men have mothers . . . It's a truth that the newly unhyphenated Maisie Grey has learned the hard way. After getting rid of her mama's-boy husband, she happily settles down with her teenage son, Tommy. But she's still stuck with the hovering presence of her impossible mother-in-law, Tommy's grandmother, who refuses to exit the family stage gracefully. Trying to keep it together with her own business and a new relationship with a man who still lives in—where else but?—his mother's house, Maisie struggles to learn from the MIL-from-hell. She vows that when Tommy brings someone home, she'll be loving, empathetic, and supportive. But then along comes completely unsuitable September Silva—with her too-short skirts, black nail polish, and stay-out-all-night attitude—who is forcing Maisie to take a flinty, clear-eyed new look at what it means to be a mother.
Download or read book The End of an Error written by Mameve Medwed and published by Grand Central Pub. This book was released on 2003 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the critically acclaimed "Mail" and "Host Family" delivers this funny yet provocative tale about one woman's inability to forget her first love.
Download or read book Poems written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and published by . This book was released on 1867 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Aurora Leigh written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aurora Leigh is an aspiring poet of independent spirit, rebelling against the stifling constraints of Victorian middle-class society and struggling for self expression. This story exposes the hypocrisy and repressive social attitudes of Victorian England.
Download or read book What My Mother Gave Me written by Elizabeth Benedict and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In What My Mother Gave Me, women look at the relationships between mothers and daughters through a new lens: a daughter’s story of a gift from her mother that has touched her to the bone and served as a model, a metaphor, or a touchstone in her own life. The contributors of these thirty-one original pieces include Pulitzer Prize winners, perennial bestselling novelists, and celebrated broadcast journalists. Whether a gift was meant to keep a daughter warm, put a roof over her head, instruct her in the ways of womanhood, encourage her talents, or just remind her of a mother’s love, each story gets to the heart of a relationship. Rita Dove remembers the box of nail polish that inspired her to paint her nails in the wild stripes and polka dots she wears to this day. Lisa See writes about the gift of writing from her mother, Carolyn See. Cecilia Muñoz remembers both the wok her mother gave her and a lifetime of home-cooked family meals. Judith Hillman Paterson revisits the year of sobriety her mother bequeathed to her when Paterson was nine, the year before her mother died of alcoholism. Abigail Pogrebin writes about her middle-aged bat mitzvah, for which her mother provided flowers after a lifetime of guilt for skipping her daughter’s religious education. Margo Jefferson writes about her mother’s gold dress from the posh department store where they could finally shop as black women. Collectively, the pieces have a force that feels as elemental as the tides: outpourings of lightness and darkness; joy and grief; mother love and daughter love; mother love and daughter rage. In these stirring words we find that every gift, ?no matter how modest, tells the story of a powerful bond. As Elizabeth Benedict points out in her introduction, “whether we are mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, or cherished friends, we may not know for quite some time which presents will matter the most."
Download or read book This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage written by Ann Patchett and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'So compellingly personal you feel you're looking over her shoulder as she sits down to write' New York Times 'Electrically entertaining ... Funny, generous, spirited and kind' The Times This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is an irresistible blend of literature and memoir revealing the big experiences and little moments that shaped Ann Patchett as a daughter, wife, friend and writer. Here, Ann Patchett shares entertaining and moving stories about her tumultuous childhood, her painful early divorce, the excitement of selling her first book, driving a Winnebago from Montana to Yellowstone Park, her joyous discovery of opera, scaling a six-foot wall in order to join the Los Angeles Police Department, the gradual loss of her beloved grandmother, starting her own bookshop in Nashville, her love for her very special dog and, of course, her eventual happy marriage. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is a memoir both wide ranging and deeply personal, overflowing with close observation and emotional wisdom, told with wit, honesty and irresistible warmth.
Download or read book Robert and Elizabeth written by Ron Grainer and published by Samuel French Limited. This book was released on 1967 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year 1845 finds the Moulton Barrett family of London tight in the grip of a tyrannical father. His invalid daughter Elizabeth is gaining a brilliant reputation as a writer. Her verses reach Robert Browning who falls in love with her before they have ever met. Browning sweeps into Elizabeth's life with the invigorating force of a sea breeze and her father senses that his absolute authority is in danger. Tension mounts as Edward Moulton Barrett and Robert Browning engage in a struggle for Elizabeth's life and happiness. A big hit in London's West End.10 women, 30 men
Download or read book She Will Soar Bright brave poems about freedom by women written by Ana Sampson and published by Macmillan Children's Books. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sister volume to She is Fierce this is a stunning gift book featuring 130 poems written by women. With poems from classic, well loved poets as well as innovative and bold modern voices, She Will Soar is a stunning collection and an essential addition to any bookshelf. From the ancient world right up to the present day, it includes poems on wanderlust, travel, daydreams, flights of fancy, escaping into books, tranquillity, courage, hope and resilience. From frustrated housewives to passionate activists, from servants and suffragettes to some of today’s most gifted writers, here is a bold choir of voices demanding independence and celebrating their hard-won power. Immerse yourself in poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Christina Rossetti, Stevie Smith, Sarah Crossan, Emily Dickinson, Salena Godden, Mary Jean Chan, Charly Cox, Nikita Gill, Fiona Benson, Hollie McNish and Grace Nichols to name but a few
