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Real men don't take guff from snotty kids. Neither does Disko Troop, skipper of the We're Here, a fishing schooner out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, when his crew fishes Harvey Cheyne out of the Atlantic. There's no place on the Grand Banks for bystanders, so Harvey is press-ganged into service as a replacement for a man lost overboard and drowned. Harvey is heir to a vast fortune, but his rescuers believe none of what he tells them of his background. Disko won't take the boat to port until it is full of fish, so Harvey must settle in for a season at sea. Hard, dangerous work and performing it alongside a grab-bag of characters in close quarters is a life-changing experience. And when Harvey at last is reunited with his parents, who have thought him dead for months, he must face the hard decisions of how he will allow his experience to change his life. (Summary Mark F. Smith)...

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In the last of the six Palliser novels, the sudden death of his wife, Lady Glencora, leaves Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium, finding himself in charge of his three children. The eldest, Lord Silverbridge, has recently been expelled from Oxford; his younger brother, Gerald, is about to enter Cambridge; and the youngest, nineteen-year old Lady Mary, has imprudently formed an attachment to Francis Tregear, who, while certainly a gentleman, unfortunately has no income. Before her death, Glencora knew (and approved) of her daughter's attachment; the Duke, however, does not know of it, and is not at all likely to approve. Mrs. Finn (the former Marie Goesler), who was Glencora's closest friend, learns from Mary of her love for Tregear, and is faced with the question of either keeping silent, thus breaking faith with the Duke (who has entrusted Lady Mary to her care) or telling the Duke, and breaking faith with Mary herself. Somewhat later Lord Silverbridge himself forms an attachment to an unsuitable (because American!) girl. The Duke, whose overriding passions in life are politics and the decimalization of English currency, finds...

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Following a failed love affair in England, Lady Bridget O'Hara accepts an invitation to travel to colonial Australia as companion to Lady Rosamund Tallant, the wife of the newly-appointed governor of Leichardt's Land. In Leichardt's Town, Lady Bridget, also known as Biddy, is reunited with her old friend and collaborator, Joan Gildea, special correspondent for The Imperialist newspaper. While visiting Joan, Biddy meets Colin McKeith, a roughly-hewn, Scottish-born pioneer, drover, miner, sometime-politician, and magistrate in the north-eastern colony. Biddy and Colin fall in love: she with the adventure a life with him promises, he with an ideal of her noble heritage. In spite of Joan Gildea's misgivings, Biddy and Colin are soon married and leave Leichardt's Town to travel several days north to Colin's cattle property in a region known as the Leura. As Biddy and Colin embark on their life together, the contemporary issues of colonial Australia are revealed: the extreme environment, labour shortages and organisation, police brutality, immigration policy, and the plight of Australia's First Peoples. The couple discover fundamental dif...

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Best known for his literary work The Blue Lagoon , which has been made into film several times over, H. De Vere Stacpoole’s first publication was a book titled The Intended in 1894. Stacpoole was disappointed at its lack of commercial success, and felt the story was too good to let go. He eventually re-worked the book, culminating in The Man Who Lost Himself , a light-hearted story of a luckless American visiting London on yet another of his failed business ventures, when he happens upon a gentleman of status and wealth, who also just happens to be his exact look-alike. (Summary by Roger Melin)...

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This novella explores the relationship between Frank Saltram, a charismatic speaker who is also a freeloader; Ruth Anvoy, a young American who visits her widowed aunt, Lady Coxon, an American who married a Brit; and George Gravener, a British intellectual with a future in politics who becomes engaged to Ms. Anvoy. The story revolves around the dispersal of The Coxon Fund, a sum of money left by Ms. Anvoy’s father with the stipulation that is be given to a great man to publish and pursue moral truth. (Summary by Dorlene Kaplan)...

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Lulu Bett is a spinster, living at the turn of the 20th century essentially as a servant with her sister Ina and brother-in-law Dwight. She is, uncomplainingly, the family beast of burden, living in the background and tending to the family's needs. It therefore surprises everyone, Lulu included, when Dwight's visiting brother Ninian proposes to her, and she accepts. The surprise is even greater when Lulu returns home alone from their homeymoon trip, with the news that Ninian was already legally married before he married her. What follows brings Lulu into conflict with the self-satisfied Dwight, forcing her to choose how she defines herself, with unexpected results. This novel is the basis of the 1921 play for which Zona Gale became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The original ending of the play, in which Lulu gains freedom by walking away from the security of the family, was considered so controversial that a new ending was written. In this, the book, we see the author's original intent. (Summary by Christine Dufour)...

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When it appeared in 1874, Lady Anna met with little success, and positively outraged the conservative - `This is the sort of thing the reading public will never stand...a man must be embittered by some violent present exasperation who can like such disruptions of social order as this.' (Saturday Review) - although Trollope himself considered it `the best novel I ever wrote! Very much! Quite far away above all others!!!' This tightly constructed and passionate study of enforced marriage in the world of Radical politics and social inequality, records the lifelong attempt of Countess Lovel to justify her claim to her title, and her daughter Anna's legitimacy, after her husband announces that he already has a wife. However, mother and daughter are driven apart when Anna defies her mother's wish that she marry her cousin, heir to her father's title, and falls in love with journeyman tailor and young Radical Daniel Thwaite. The outcome is never in doubt, but Trollope's ambivalence on the question is profound, and the novel both intense and powerful....

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Louisa May Alcott's beloved 1868 novel is about the four March girls - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy - who are growing up in Massachusetts during the Civil War. As the novel opens, their father is away at war, and the girls are struggling to be good and to reconcile themselves to their relative poverty. Each has her trials to deal with, and they are encouraged by their loving mother, and by their friendship with their neighbor, Theodore Laurie Laurence....

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The Moon and Sixpence is a 1919 short novel by William Somerset Maugham based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin. The story is told in episodic form by the first-person narrator as a series of glimpses into the mind and soul of the central character, Charles Strickland, a middle aged English stock broker who abandons his wife and children abruptly to pursue his desire to become an artist....

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Most times, especially in the time when this book was written (1895), it is just as nature and society would wish: a man and woman fall in love and get married. But it is not so for Herminia Barton and Alan Merrick. They do indeed fall in love, but Herminia has a deeply held belief in freedom for women, and she holds immutable views against what she perceives as the slavery of marriage. Alan unwillingly agrees to her strong wish to remain unmarried and to live together as close and dear friends. When the birth of their child is imminent, they go to his beloved Italy to avoid the condemnation of English society. From this point on, many questions are raised: is marriage indeed so important? Is strong will always good? Is it right to go against society? And if it is, when should we stop and consider the effects on other people? What should a child do when she is raised to be what her mother dreams and develops her own dreams in the process? And, finally, how much should parents sacrifice for their children? (Summary by Stav Nisser and Ruth Golding)...

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Joel Shore, newly appointed captain of the whaling ship Nathan Ross following his brother's apparent demise as captain of the same ship, elects to make his first cruise as captain to the very location where his brother had last been seen - the Gilbert Islands, in order to try to learn more about what happened to his brother. The focus of this tale is of that voyage halfway around the globe and the adventures which he and his crew encounter. (Summary by Roger Melin)...

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This is a COMPELLING semi-autobiography of a woman who experienced severe highs and lows! Starting many things at a very young age in life & experiencing incredible happiness! Only all too soon to find herself in extreme opposite situations. This book shows some of the true heartlessness that some human beings can display, as well as some family. It conveys hypocrisy of some in the religious world. It also displays true grit and what desperation can do to drive a person! This book will inevitably cause the reader to experience several emotions and thoughts, some pleasant, some not so nice. Live the journey along with the author! A MUST read! (Written by Deborah Knight)...

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The Quest of the Silver Fleece is a story of romance, race economics and politics set around the 1900s. Here, a traditionally educated boy and an unschooled “swamp girl” each begin a journey toward love, ambition and redemption in the “Old South.” (Summary by AJai Hilton)...

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A man who has been condemned to death writes down his cogitations, feelings and fears while he is waiting for his execution. He does not betray his name to the reader or what he has done. He describes his life in prison, everything from what his cell looks like to the personality of the prison priest....

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Reuben Sachs is a London lawyer whose political aspirations do not include marriage to Judith Quixano, the daughter of a respectable but unexeptional family. But without Reuben, a woman like Judith might have a bleak future in mid-19th century England: a loveless marriage or lifelong dependancy are apparently her only options... A feminist, a Jew, and a lesbian, Amy Levy wrote about Anglo-Jewish cultural mores and the lives of would-be independent women in Victorian society. Levy was as repelled by contemporary literature's occasional paragon (e.g., Daniel Deronda) as by its more frequent anti-Semitic stereotypes. REUBEN SACHS was her attempt at an honest, warts-and-all account of middle class Jewish life in late-19th century London. While many of Levy's contemporaries condemned the book as a shanda fur die goyim (an embarassment), Oscar Wilde wrote: Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make REUBEN SACHS, in some sort, a classic. Amy Levy (1861-1889) was born in London and educated in Brighton and at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her social set incl...

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George Gissing's 1893 novel takes on the 19th century Woman Question by looking at themes of feminism, marriage, and love. The novel raises these issues through the lives of several contrasting women: Mary Barfoot, a feminist philanthropist who helps train women for careers; her close friend Rhoda Nunn, who believes marriage is a disastrous choice for women; and Monica Madden, who starts out as one of their protegees but chooses to marry a seemingly kind older man. As Monica experiences the challenges of married life, Rhoda finds herself drawn to Mary's cousin, the charming but apparently profligate Everard. (Summary by Elizabeth Klett)...

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The story of seven girls who have banded themselves together for mutual help and cheer under the name of Nous Autres. They represent, collectively, the professions open to women of no deliberate training, though well educated. They are introduced to the reader at one of their weekly gatherings and then the author proceeds to depict the home and business life of each one individually. (From the 1909 back-of-book advertisement)...

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This book is the second in Bennett’s four books about life in the Five Towns (the real life Potteries in Staffordshire). It tells the story of Hilda before her marriage to Edwin Clayhanger (from the first book). Bennett explores Hilda's ambition to make a career for herself, her coming of age and her working experiences as a shorthand clerk and keeper of a lodging house in London and Brighton. He also shows her intensifying relationship with the enigmatic George Cannon that ends in her disastrous bigamous marriage and pregnancy, and finally her reconciliation with Edwin Clayhanger (Summary by Simon Evers)...

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The Damnation of Theron Ware (published in England as Illumination) is an 1896 novel by American author Harold Frederic. It is widely considered a classic of American realism. The novel reveals a great deal about turn-of-the-century provincial America, religious life, and the depressed state of intellectual and artistic culture in small towns. The novel centers on the life of a Methodist pastor named Theron Ware who has recently moved to a fictional small town in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, which Frederic modeled after Utica, New York. A promising young pastor recently married, Theron has a number of experiences that cause him to begin to question the Methodist religion, his role as a priest and even the very existence of God. His moral decline (or illumination) is heightened through his dealings with Father Forbes, the town's Catholic priest; Dr. Ledsmar, a local atheist, philosopher, and man of science; and Celia, a local Irish Catholic girl, a species of aesthete, with whom Theron becomes hopelessly infatuated....

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When Belinda was published in 1801, it became both controversial and popular. Controversial because of the inter-racial marriage presented in the novel, and popular because it's a very good comedy of manners, like Evelina by Fanny Burney. Belinda, like Evelina, is a soft and loving girl of 17, is coming to London with her aunt who directs her action in order to make sure that she'll find a good match. But what will happen if Belinda will fall in love? Will Clarence Hervey, the man she loves, be able to marry her? It seems almost impossible, as he is secretly bringing up another woman to be a perfect wife to him and now, in all honor, he thinks he must marry her. These social novels about young women trying to find good husbands were admired by Jane Austen who referred to Belinda, among other novels, in her own novel Northanger Abbey: “'And what are you reading, Miss — ?' 'Oh! It is only a novel!' replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. 'It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda'; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which...

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