Download or read book The Impossible Life of Mary Benson written by Rodney Bolt and published by Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable true story of the life of Mary Benson: wife of an archbishop, friend of Queen Victoria, mother of three "unpermissably gifted" children—including E. F. Benson, and in love with dozens of women Sometimes touching and sometimes hilarious, this is the story of one lovable, brilliant woman and her trajectory through the often surprising opportunities and the remarkable limitations of a Victorian woman's life. Young Minnie Sidgwick was just 12 years old when her cousin, 12-year-old Edward Benson, proposed to her in 1853. Edward went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury and little Minnie—as Mary Benson—to preside a social world that ranged from Tennyson, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde to foreign royalty and Queen Victoria herself. Yet Mrs. Benson's most intense relationships were not with her husband and his associates, but with other women. When the Archbishop died, Mary, or "Ben" to her intimates, turned down an offer from the Queen to live at Windsor, and set up home in a Jacobean manor house with her friend Lucy Tait. Drawing on the diaries and novels of the Bensons themselves, including E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels, as well as the writing of contemporary writers and poets, this book creates a very rich portrait of Mary Benson, her family, her close female friends, and their world.
Download or read book As Good as God as Clever as the Devil written by Rodney Bolt and published by Atlantic Books (UK). This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY. She is as good as God, and as clever as the Devil.' Dame Ethel Smyth, English composer and leader of the women's suffrage movement Archbishop of Canterbury, insufferable to the end, died on his knees in church saying the CoBGession, after a life of relentless success. At that moment his wife Mary became nobody... 'All this is over,' Mary wrote in her diary, 'it has fallen to pieces around us.'' her just three years later. Through her marriage to Edward, whose career would take him from success as a young head schoolmaster to become Archbishop of Canterbury, Mary Benson came to preside over Lambeth Palace and a social circle that ranged from famous politicians and celebrated writers to Queen Victoria herself. But Mrs Benson's most intense and intimate relationships were not with her husband, but with other women.
Download or read book The Wry Romance of the Literary Rectory written by Deborah Alun-Jones and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully written book that tells the stories of historic rectories across England and Wales and the writers past and present who have been associated with them As the sons and daughters of clergy, many of Britain’s most popular writers have grown up in rectories, parsonages, and vicarages—Jane Austen, Alfred Tennyson, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Edmund de Waal among them—while other writers have been drawn to their romance and seclusion. The period that Rupert Brooke spent living out a neo-pagan fantasy in idyllic Grantchester, near Cambridge, greatly influenced his 1912 poem ”The Old Vicarage,“ a work that became a romantic touchstone for an idealized national identity at a time of war. The Old Rectory on the Berkshire Downs was the locus of John Betjeman’s campaign to revive the parochial parish life whose disappearance he deeply regretted. The rectory has also been home to eccentrics such as Sydney Smith of Foston Rectory in remote North Yorkshire. This wit and essayist was known for his unorthodox sermons and astute contributions to the Edinburgh Review. Compelled to abandon his London life by the enforcement of the Residence Act of 1803, which required priests to live in or near their parishes, Smith bemoaned a posting that was, he wrote, “twelve miles from a lemon.” Nonetheless he threw himself into rural life—and often off his horse, Calamity, in the process.
Download or read book Queen Victoria s Archbishops of Canterbury written by Michael Chandler and published by Sacristy Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six pen-portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury during Queen Victoria's reign show how the Church of England and the Anglican Communion became what they are today.
Download or read book The Happiness Philosophers written by Bart Schultz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A colorful history of utilitarianism told through the lives and ideas of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and its other founders In The Happiness Philosophers, Bart Schultz tells the colorful story of the lives and legacies of the founders of utilitarianism—one of the most influential yet misunderstood and maligned philosophies of the past two centuries. Best known for arguing that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong," utilitarianism was developed by the radical philosophers, critics, and social reformers William Godwin (the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley), Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. Together, they had a profound influence on nineteenth-century reforms, in areas ranging from law, politics, and economics to morals, education, and women's rights. Their work transformed life in ways we take for granted today. Bentham even advocated the decriminalization of same-sex acts, decades before the cause was taken up by other activists. As Bertrand Russell wrote about Bentham in the late 1920s, "There can be no doubt that nine-tenths of the people living in England in the latter part of last century were happier than they would have been if he had never lived." Yet in part because of its misleading name and the caricatures popularized by figures as varied as Dickens, Marx, and Foucault, utilitarianism is sometimes still dismissed as cold, calculating, inhuman, and simplistic. By revealing the fascinating human sides of the remarkable pioneers of utilitarianism, The Happiness Philosophers provides a richer understanding and appreciation of their philosophical and political perspectives—one that also helps explain why utilitarianism is experiencing a renaissance today and is again being used to tackle some of the world's most serious problems.
Download or read book Deviance in Neo Victorian Culture written by Saverio Tomaiuolo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that ‘deviance’ represents a central issue in neo-Victorian culture, and that the very concept of neo-Victorianism is based upon the idea of ‘diverging’ from accepted notions regarding the nineteenth-century frame of mind. However, the study of the ways in which the Victorian age has been revised by contemporary authors does not only entail analogies with the present but proves – by introducing what is perhaps a more pertinent description of the nineteenth century – that it was much more ‘deviant’ than it is usually depicted and perceived. Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture: Canon, Transgression, Innovation explores a wide variety of textual forms, from novels to TV series, from movies and graphic novels to visual art. The scholarly and educational purpose of this study is to stimulate readers to approach neo-Victorianism as a complex cultural phenomenon.
Download or read book A Very Queer Family Indeed written by Simon Goldhill and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The family that wrote itself -- Sensation! -- Wooing mother -- Bringing up the subject -- Fifty ways to say I hate my father -- Tell the truth, my boy -- A map of biographical urges -- To write a life -- Women in love -- Graphomania -- Being queer -- What's in a name? -- Though wholly pure and good -- He never married -- All London is agog -- Carnal affections -- Be a man, my boy -- "It's not unusual . . ." -- The god of our fathers -- It will be worth dying -- The deeper self that can't decide -- Our father -- Secret history -- Writing the history of the church -- Building history -- Forms of worship -- Capturing the Bensons -- Not I
Download or read book Arthur Balfour s Ghosts written by Trevor Hamilton and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the incredible story of the cross-correspondence automatic writings, described by one leading scholar of the field, Alan Gauld, 'as undoubtedly the most extensive, the most complex and the most puzzling of all ostensible attempts by deceased persons to manifest purpose, and in so doing to fulfil their overriding purpose of proving their survival'. It is an intensely personal and passionate story on so many levels: May Lyttelton trying to convince her lover Arthur Balfour of her continued existence; Myers with indomitable persistence trying to produce evidence to prove survival generally; Gurney and Francis Balfour striving from beyond the grave to influence the birth of children who would work for world peace; Gerald Balfour and his lover Winifred Coombe-Tennant believing that their child, Henry, would be the Messianic leader of this group of children.
Download or read book The Literary Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Man Who Went Too Far written by E. F. Benson and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2021-04-11 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Man Who Went Too Far is a short story by E.F. Benson. A man dedicates himself to realizing "unity" in conjunction with nature. In time he gets it, but it is not at all what he expected.
Download or read book Dr James Barry written by Michael Du Preez and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Sunday Times Book of the Year As featured on the BBC Radio 2 Book Club Dr James Barry: Inspector General of Hospitals, army surgeon, duellist, reformer, ladykiller, eccentric. He performed the first successful Caesarean in the British Empire, outraged the military establishment and gave Florence Nightingale a dressing down at Scutari. At home he was surrounded by a menagerie of animals, including a cat, a goat, a parrot and a terrier. Long ago in Cork, Ireland, he had also been a mother. This is the amazing tale of Margaret Anne Bulkley, the young woman who broke the rules of Georgian society to become one of the most respected surgeons of the century. In an extraordinary life, she crossed paths with the British Empire's great and good, royalty and rebels, soldiers and slaves. A medical pioneer, she rose to a position that no woman before her had been allowed to occupy, but for all her successes, her long, audacious deception also left her isolated, even costing her the chance to be with the man she loved.
Download or read book Why Truth Matters written by Jeremy Stangroom and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2006-02-09 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Truth has always been a central preoccupation of philosophy in allits forms and traditions. Yet in the late twentieth century truth became suddenly rather unfashionable. The precedence given to assortedpolitical and ideological agendas, along with the rise of relativism, postmodernism and pseudoscience in academia, led to a decline both of truth as a serious subject, and an intellectual tradition thatbegan with the Enlightenment. Why Truth Matters is a timely, incisive and entertaining look at how and why modern thought and culture lost sight of the importance of truth. It is also an eloquent and inspiring argument for restoring truth to its rightful place. Jeremy Stangroom and Ophelia Benson, editors of the successful butterfliesandwheels website-itself established to "fight fashionable nonsense"-identify and debunk such senselessness, and the spurious claims made for it, in all its forms. Their account ranges over religious fundamentalism, Holocaust denial, the challenges of postmodernism and deconstruction, the wilful misinterpretation of evolutionary biology, identity politics and wishful thinking. Why Truth Matters is both a rallying cry for the enlightened vision and an essential read for anyone who's everbeen bored, frustrated, bewildered or plain enraged by the worst excesses of the fashionable intelligentsia.
Download or read book The Chaperone written by Laura Moriarty and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soon to be a feature film from the creators of Downton Abbey starring Elizabeth McGovern, The Chaperone is a New York Times-bestselling novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in the 1920s and the summer that would change them both. Only a few years before becoming a famous silent-film star and an icon of her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita, Kansas, to study with the prestigious Denishawn School of Dancing in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone, who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle, a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip, has no idea what she’s in for. Young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous black bob with blunt bangs, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will transform their lives forever. For Cora, the city holds the promise of discovery that might answer the question at the core of her being, and even as she does her best to watch over Louise in this strange and bustling place she embarks on a mission of her own. And while what she finds isn’t what she anticipated, she is liberated in a way she could not have imagined. Over the course of Cora’s relationship with Louise, her eyes are opened to the promise of the twentieth century and a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive. Drawing on the rich history of the 1920s, ’30s, and beyond—from the orphan trains to Prohibition, flappers, and the onset of the Great Depression to the burgeoning movement for equal rights and new opportunities for women—Laura Moriarty’s The Chaperone illustrates how rapidly everything, from fashion and hemlines to values and attitudes, was changing at this time and what a vast difference it all made for Louise Brooks, Cora Carlisle, and others like them.
Download or read book The Contemporary Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Echo Within written by Robert Benson and published by WaterBrook. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I can remember the words people said that meant so much to me and my own sense of who I was and who I might become.... You know you have heard such a sentence when you hear inside a corresponding Yes. The Yes is an echo of sorts, or at least it is the same voice as is the Echo that you have come to count on. Such a sentence takes your breath away.... It tells you something about yourself that you suspected or hoped, something you glimpsed but were too shy or uncertain to name aloud." To Hear and Live Your Calling When one day a friend wondered if he was being called to a certain field of work, he asked Robert Benson, "Do you think I am?" The Echo Within is Robert's illuminating answer, a thoughtful, honest, profoundly-affecting account of his own search and failings and eventual discovery of the Yes he describes-what it is one truly is called to do and be. Written out of a lifelong search and response to the callings on his life, The Echo Within explores: *how to love the work you do, and the process of doing it. *ways to sense God's pleasure in your pursuits, both in the pursuits and in you. *whether you fall into your vocation as a destiny or you chart that course. *how to begin living with added dimensions of meaning and purpose. Through the ups and downs of the changes inherent in family life, professional choice, and spiritual experience, Robert shares with wisdom, humor, and heart what he's learned-and how you can discover your calling too. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Download or read book The Quaker written by Liam McIlvanney and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Best Book of the Year: Based on true events, “a solidly crafted and satisfying detective story” set in 1960s Glasgow (The Guardian). It is 1969 and Glasgow is in the grip of the worst winter in decades. But it is something else that has Glaswegians on edge: a serial killer is at large. The brutality of The Quaker’s latest murder— a young woman snatched from a nightclub, her body dumped like trash in the back of a cold-water tenement—has the city trembling with fear, and the police investigation seems to be going nowhere. Duncan McCormick, a talented young detective from the Highlands, is brought into the investigation to identify where it’s gone wrong. An outsider with troubling secrets of his own, DI McCormack has few friends in his adopted city and a lot to prove. His arrival is met with anger and distrust by cops who are desperate to nail a suspect. When they identify a petty thief as the man seen leaving the building where the Quaker’s last victim was found, they decide they’ve found their killer. But McCormack isn’t convinced . . . From ruined backstreets to deserted public parks and down into the dark heart of Glasgow, McCormack follows a trail of secrets that will change the city—and his life—forever. “Intricately plotted . . . gorgeously written.” —Toronto Star “A terrific novel, dark, powerful . . . I finished it a while ago, but I’m still haunted.” —Ann Cleeves, bestselling author of Shetland
Download or read book Thornyhold written by Mary Stewart and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A comfortable chair and a Mary Stewart: total heaven. I'd rather read her than most other authors.' Harriet Evans The rambling house called Thornyhold is like something out of a fairy tale. Left to Gilly Ramsey by the cousin whose occasional visits brightened her childhood, the cottage, set deep in a wild wood, has come just in time to save her from a bleak future. With its reputation for magic and its resident black cat, Thornyhold offers Gilly more than just a new home. It offers her a chance to start over. The old house, with it tufts of rosy houseleek and the spreading gilt of the lichens, was beautiful. Even the prisoning hedges were beautiful, protective with their rusty thorns, their bastions of holly and juniper, and at the corners, like towers, their thick columns of yews. 'Mary Stewart is magic' New York Times 'One of the great British storytellers of the 20th century' Independent
