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 Resuming Maurice written by Philip Mosley and published by Dufour Editions. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of personal essays on greater and lesser known writers whose lives and careers have sparked some of Philip Mosley’s own literary and historical interests. Drawing on the experience of a forty-year academic career, he also introduces elements of personal narrative into his appreciations of this diverse set of authors whose backgrounds range from English (Vita Sackville West, Whitwell Elwin, George Barker, John Seymour, Virginia Haggard, J.K. Nettlefold), Welsh (Dylan Thomas) and American (Ned Washington) to Belgian (Maurice Maeterlinck), Danish (Karen Blixen), Mexican (Octavio Paz, Rosario Castellanos) and Kenyan (Ngugi wa Thiong’o). Corresponding to the growing academic sub-discipline of celebrity studies, a unifying theme of literary celebrity and its discontents runs throughout the volume. Chapter 1, ‘Resuming Maurice,’ on Maeterlinck, is the capstone essay and includes a ‘Pre-amble’ on the celebrity theme. The essays on Barker, Elwin, Seymour and Nettlefold have strong East Anglian connections, while the one on Virginia Haggard invokes the Norfolk origin of her famous great-uncle, the Victorian novelist Sir Henry Rider Haggard. The collection aims at the ‘common reader’ (in Virginia Woolf ’s sense), a broad audience of literary enthusiasts and especially those interested in how literary history and criticism, biography and memoir, and celebrity studies may intersect in productive and engaging ways.
Download or read book Beautiful World Where Are You written by Sally Rooney and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
Download or read book A Time of Gifts written by Patrick Leigh Fermor and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-09-14 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written. At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor’s book explores a remarkable moment in time. Hitler has just come to power but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed—through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire; up the Rhine, and down to the Danube. At once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come.
Download or read book Jane Austen at Home written by Lucy Worsley and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A trip back to the world of Jane Austen and the homes she lived in with noted historian Lucy Worsley.
Download or read book Ashenden written by Elizabeth Wilhide and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epic saga of the upstairs and downstairs residents of an English country house which spans some 240 years and includes the stories of its original architect, a Victorian family that shared four decades of family history, soldiers billeted in the house during World War I, and a young couple who restores the house in the 1950s.
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 A Few Green Leaves written by Barbara Pym and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-03-21 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Barbara Pym is one of my most favourite novelists. Few other writers have given me more laughter and more pleasure.' Jilly Cooper Barbara Pym was an incomparable chronicler of ordinary, quiet lives. With warmth, humour, precision and great vividness, she gave her best characters an independent life we recognise as totally familiar. In A Few Green Leaves, her last novel, her heroine is Emma Howick, anthropologist. Through her eyes Barbara Pym examines in her own ironic and individual style the quiet revolution in English village life, combining the rural settings of her earliest novels with the themes and characters of her later works. The result is a compelling portrait of a town that seems to be forgotten by time, but which is unmistakably affected by it. Romance shares the pages with death in this engaging novel that is the culmination of Barbara Pym's acclaimed writing career. 'I could go on reading her for ever' A L Rowse, Punch 'A vivid sense of how we live now' New Statesman 'Her sense of brilliant comedy is a direct inheritance from Jane Austen' Hibernia 'A beautifully written, very delicate comedy' The Times Literary Supplement
Download or read book The Old Rectory written by Anthony Jennings and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-28 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pevsner described the pairing of church and parsonage as a feature of the English village unparalleled on the Continent. John Betjeman saw the design of rectories and vicarages as highly influential on our architecture. Forsaken by the Church but coveted by the private buyer, this is the story of these quintessentially English houses, with their combination of fine architecture, charm and character, large gardens and often splendidly rural locations. The Old Rectory examines their history, their evolution through the centuries, their many and varied styles of architecture, and their place in our heritage. It also explores the contribution made to our culture by the clerical families who once occupied these houses, and the famous people and eccentrics who have been associated with them. Finally, it considers their current role, and what the future might hold.
Download or read book If You Want to Make God Laugh written by Bianca Marais and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich, unforgettable story of three unique women in post-Apartheid South Africa who are brought together in their darkest time and discover the ways that love can transcend the strictest of boundaries. In a squatter camp on the outskirts of Johannesburg, seventeen-year-old Zodwa lives in desperate poverty, under the shadowy threat of a civil war and a growing AIDS epidemic. Eight months pregnant, Zodwa carefully guards secrets that jeopardize her life. Across the country, wealthy socialite Ruth appears to have everything her heart desires, but it's what she can't have that leads to her breakdown. Meanwhile, in Zaire, a disgraced former nun, Delilah, grapples with a past that refuses to stay buried. When these personal crises send both middle-aged women back to their rural hometown to heal, the discovery of an abandoned newborn baby upends everything, challenging their lifelong beliefs about race, motherhood, and the power of the past. As the mystery surrounding the infant grows, the complicated lives of Zodwa, Ruth, and Delilah become inextricably linked. What follows is a mesmerizing look at family and identity that asks: How far will the human heart go to protect itself and the ones it loves?
Download or read book Charming written by Deborah Alun-Jones and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lavishly illustrated celebration of the role and significance of charm jewelry presents historical and anecdotal information about the symbolic meanings of charms, references the collections of such individuals as Grace Kelly and Marlene Dietrich, and cites the twenty-first-century's growing charm popularity.
Download or read book Constructing Nineteenth Century Religion written by Joshua King and published by . This book was released on 2022-04-02 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the ways in which religion was constructed as a category and region of experience in nineteenth-century literature and culture.
Download or read book Folk lore of West and Mid Wales written by Jonathan Ceredig Davies and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Gate of Angels written by Penelope Fitzgerald and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1998 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1912, rational Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger--fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications--not only of the heart but also of the head--as Fred and Daisy take up each other's education and turn each other's philosophies upside-down.
Download or read book English Book Collectors written by William Younger Fletcher and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Murder Before Evensong written by The Reverend Richard Coles and published by Titan Books (US, CA). This book was released on 2023-07-11 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I've been waiting for a novel with vicars, rude old ladies, murder and sausage dogs... et voila!" Dawn French This first in a new series is a charming, warm and witty tale of secrets and murder set among the parishioners of a quaint English village. The No.1 Sunday Times bestselling crime novel, perfect for fans of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series. 'Whodunnit fans can give praise and rejoice' IAN RANKIN Canon Daniel Clement is Rector of Champton. He has been there for eight years, living at the Rectory alongside his widowed mother–opinionated, fearless, ever-so-slightly annoying Audrey–and his two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda. When Daniel announces a plan to install a lavatory in church, the parish is suddenly (and unexpectedly) divided: as lines are drawn, long-buried secrets come dangerously close to destroying the apparent calm of the village. And then Anthony Bowness–cousin to Bernard de Floures, patron of Champton–is found dead at the back of the church, stabbed in the neck with a pair of pruning shears. As the police moves in and the bodies start piling up, Daniel is the only one who can try and keep his fractured community together... and catch a killer. A delightful, cosy murder mystery with a sharp edge from the bestselling author.
Download or read book Felix Holt the Radical written by George Eliot and published by . This book was released on 1885 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in 1830s England, Felix Holt tells the story of proud and sensitive Esther Lyon, who dreams of a life of refinement and must choose betweeen wealthy Harold Transome and idealistic reformer Felix Holt.
