Download or read book The Magnificent Spinster written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: May Sarton’s powerful and profound novel of an extraordinary life, and of one woman’s efforts to preserve the force and vitality of her experiences on the pages of a book For the second time in my life—and I am now seventy—I am embarking on an effort which may well come to nothing but which has possessed my mind, haunts, and will not let me sleep. From her opening statement, Cam, the narrator of The Magnificent Spinster, declares her grand intentions: to write a novel—a worthy and important one in celebration of her recently deceased friend and teacher, Jane Reid, whose dearth of family threatens the memory of her almost tangible greatness. And so she writes, re-creating Jane’s childhood, adolescence, and years as a teacher—including the one in which Cam was her student. She writes of Jane’s irrepressible spirit and the charming letters Jane penned about her adventures, and she recounts Jane’s growing isolation as she aged, which, rather than softening her, only made her shine brighter. Raw, warm, and beautifully rendered, The Magnificent Spinster is a stunning achievement—part memoir, part epistolary recollection, and part novel within a novel about friendship, memory, and the power of a brilliant soul.
Download or read book The Magnificent Spinster written by May Sarton and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 1989-03 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “magnificent spinster” is Jane Reid, a teacher who became not only a revered role model but a dear friend to Cam, the narrator of this novel within a novel. After Jane’s death, the accidental discovery of poems written by Cam in her youth to Jane prompts a flood of recollections—and frees Cam to imagine in fiction Jane’s passionately vibrant life.
Download or read book The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath written by Jane Robins and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham and Margaret Lofty are three women with one thing in common. They are spinsters and are desperate to marry. Each woman meets a smooth-talking stranger who promises her a better life. She falls under his spell, and becomes his wife. But marriage soon turns into a terrifying experience. In the dark opening months of the First World War, Britain became engrossed by 'The Brides in the Bath' trial. The horror of the killing fields of the Western Front was the backdrop to a murder story whose elements were of a different sort. This was evil of an everyday, insidious kind, played out in lodging houses in seaside towns, in the confines of married life, and brought to a horrendous climax in that most intimate of settings -- the bathroom. The nation turned to a young forensic pathologist, Bernard Spilsbury, to explain how it was that young women were suddenly expiring in their baths. This was the age of science. In fiction, Sherlock Holmes applied a scientific mind to solving crimes. In real-life, would Spilsbury be as infallible as the 'great detective'?
Download or read book Writing with Intent written by Margaret Atwood and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-21 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world's most passionately engaged and acclaimed literary citizens comes Writing with Intent, the largest collection to date of Margaret Atwood's nonfiction, ranging from 1983 to 2005. Composed of autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book reviews, and introductory pieces to great works of literature, this is the award-winning author's first book-length nonfiction publication in twenty years. Arranged chronologically, these writings display the development of Atwood's worldview as the world around her changes. Included are the Booker Prize -- winning author's reviews of books by John Updike, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as essays in which she remembers herself reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse at age nineteen, and discusses the influence of George Orwell's 1984 on the writing of The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's New York Times Book Review piece that helped make Orhan Pamuk's Snow a bestseller can be found here, as well as a look back on a family trip to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion, and her "Letter to America," written after September 11, 2001. The insightful and memorable pieces in this book serve as a testament to Atwood's career, reminding readers why she is one of the most esteemed writers of our time.
Download or read book At Seventy written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the American Book Award: May Sarton’s honest and engrossing journal of her seventieth year, spent living and working on the Maine coast. May Sarton’s journals are a captivating look at a rich artistic life. In this, her ode to aging, she savors the daily pleasures of tending to her garden, caring for her dogs, and entertaining guests at her beloved Maine home by the sea. Her reminiscences are raw, and her observations are infused with the poetic candor for which Sarton—over the course of her decades-long career—became known. An enlightening glimpse into a time—the early 1980s—and an age, At Seventy is at once specific and universal, providing a unique window into septuagenarian life that readers of all generations will enjoy. At times mournful and at others hopeful, this is a beautiful memoir of the year in which Sarton, looking back on it all, could proclaim, “I am more myself than I have ever been.”
Download or read book The Novels of May Sarton Volume One written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three luminous novels from a New York Times–bestselling author and National Book Award finalist whose “prose leaves compelling echoes in one’s mind” (The New York Times Book Review). Throughout her long and acclaimed career, May Sarton refused to be categorized. As a memoirist, poet, and novelist, she broke new ground by openly exploring homosexuality, gender inequality, and other once taboo social issues. Gathered here in one volume are three of her most memorable and moving works of fiction. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: Widely regarded as her most important work, Sarton’s 1965 semiautobiographical novel centers upon Hillary Stevens, an author now in her twilight years. As she prepares to publish anew, Stevens sits down to discuss her life, the arc of her creative journey, and her love affairs—with both men and women. “The plot of this short novel is deceptively simple, the mood subtle, the feeling intense” (The New York Times Book Review). A Shower of Summer Days: The Irish estate home Dene Court has been shuttered for years—but this summer Violet Dene Gordon and her husband Charles return from British Burma, electrifying life in the sleepy village that adjoins Violet’s childhood home. As an added complication, Violet’s American niece is being sent to Ireland to separate her from an unsuitable romantic attachment. A National Book Award finalist, “A Shower of Summer Days establishes once and for all [Sarton’s] unmistakable authority” (The New York Times Book Review). The Magnificent Spinster: This “absolutely compelling . . . monument to love . . . [and] friendship” is actually the story of two women: Cam, the novel’s narrator, and the recently deceased Jane Reid. Unmarried and childless, Jane left no family to remember her, so Cam sets out to immortalize the life of her quietly remarkable friend and teacher in fiction (The Cleveland Plain Dealer).
Download or read book Spinster written by Kate Bolick and published by Crown. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Notable Book “Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman’s existence.” So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why she—along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing—remains unmarried. This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless—the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life. Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives—a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savor.
Download or read book How hard can love be written by Holly Bourne and published by Usborne Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All Amber wants is a little bit of love. Her mum has never been the caring type, even before she moved to America. But Amber's hoping that spending the summer with her can change all that. And then there's Prom King Kyle, the serial heartbreaker. Can Amber really be falling for him? Even with best friends Evie and Lottie's advice, there's no escaping the fact: love is hard.
Download or read book Excellent Women written by Barbara Pym and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-12-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excellent Women is probably the most famous of Barbara Pym's novels. The acclaim a few years ago for this early comic novel, which was hailed by Lord David Cecil as one of 'the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years,' helped launch the rediscovery of the author's entire work. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a spinster in the England of the 1950s, one of those 'excellent women' who tend to get involved in other people's lives - such as those of her new neighbor, Rockingham, and the vicar next door. This is Barbara Pym's world at its funniest.
Download or read book The Spinster Book written by Myrtle Reed and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rumors from the Cauldron written by Valerie Miner and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An indispensable collection of essays reflecting on the historical and cultural relevance of feminist movements across the globe In these remarkably far-reaching writings, author and journalist Valerie Miner delivers a complex and engaging volume of essential reading. This book touches on topics ranging from suburban housewives to lesbian identity to feminist thought. Miner provides an important perspective on the interrelated concepts of authorship, gender identity, and social criticism. Included are examinations of the works of Grace Paley, Margaret Atwood, and May Sarton, meditations on writing, and reflections on the cultural legacy of feminism. Miner’s insights are both perspicacious and thought provoking. Written with profound passion and knowledge, these tracts are of tremendous value to all readers engaged with the politics of equality.
Download or read book May Sarton written by Margot Peters and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-05-04 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first biography of May Sarton: a brilliant revelation of the life and work of a literary figure who influenced her thousands of readers not only by her novels and poetry, but by her life and her writings about it. May Sarton's career stretched from 1930 (early sonnets published in Poetry magazine) to 1995 (her journal At Eighty-Two). She wrote more than twenty novels, and twenty-five books of poems and journals. The acclaimed biographer Margot Peters was given full access to Sarton's letters, journals, and notes, and during five years of research came to know Sarton herself--the complex woman and artist. She gives us a compelling portrait of Sarton the actress, the poet, the novelist, the feminist, the writer who struggled for literary acceptance. She shows us, beneath Sarton's exhilarating, irresistible spirit, the needy courtier and seducer, the woman whose creativity was propelled by the psychic drama she created in others. We watch young May at age two as she is abruptly uprooted from her native Belgium by World War I, a child ignored both by her mother, who was intent on her own artistic vision and reluctant to cope with a child, and by her father, obsessed with his academic research. We see Sarton as a young girl in America, and then later, at nineteen, choosing a life in the theatre, landing a job in Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory, and gathering what would become a tight-knit coterie of friends and lovers . . . Sarton beginning to write poetry and novels . . . Sarton making friends with Elizabeth Bowen and Julian Huxley, Erika and Klaus Mann, Virginia Woolf, the poet H.D.--charming and enlisting them with her work, her vitality, her hunger for love, driven by her need to conquer (among her conquests: Bowen, Huxley, and later his wife, Juliette). We see her intense friendships with literary pals, including Muriel Rukeyser (her lover), and Louise Bogan, Sarton's "literary sibling, who at once encouraged her and excluded her from a world in which Bogan was a central figure. We see Sarton begin to create in the spiritual journals that inspired the devotion of readers the image of a strong, independent woman who lived peacefully with solitude--an image that contradicted the reality of her neediness, loneliness, and isolation as she pushed away loved ones with her demands and betrayals. A fascinating portrait of one of our major literary figures--a book that for the first time reveals the life that she herself kept hidden.
Download or read book The Spinster written by Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Study Guide for Peter Taylor s A Spinster s Tale written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Study Guide for Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's Tale," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
Download or read book Women Aging written by Helen Rippier Wheeler and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 1997 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guide with more than two thousand bibliographic entries and cross-references. It includes journal articles, book chapters, essays, and doctoral dissertations, as well as complete books.
Download or read book A spinster s tour in France the states of Genoa c during 1827 written by and published by . This book was released on 1828 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Spinster s Tour in France the States of Genoa Etc During the Year 1827 written by Elizabeth Strutt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advice on European travel for unaccompanied British ladies in the early nineteenth century.
