Mostrando resultados por narrador "Margaret Melosh" en Todas las categorías

The House of Mirth is the story of Lily Bart, a penniless woman of the high society of New York City, who was raised and educated to become wife to a wealthy man, a hothouse flower for conspicuous consumption. As an unattached woman with gambling debts and an uncertain future, Lily is destroyed by the society who created her. Written in the style of a novel of manners, the writing itself is an illustration of American literary naturalism.

Helga Crane yearns to become more than she is and to feel the world more intensely. She consequently dismisses her native Chicago, New York's Harlem, Copenhagen even. She also passes on opportunities for extended family, for marriage, and for true love. What is always latent in this truly outstanding work; is how much the background of 1920's American racial segregation defines Helga's malaise, and how much - paradoxically - is of herown doing.

"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" was one of the first books to address the struggle for freedom by female slaves; explore their struggles with sexual harassment and abuse; and their effort to protect their roles as women and mothers. These memoirs tell the atrocious but true story of slavery in the United States until the Civil War. It is the personal history of Harriet Jacobs and her enslavement and following escape to the North, after spending seven years concealed in a crawlspace. The stunned listener also gets to know of the abuse of the other slaves.

The story of "The Age of Innocence" is set in upper-class New York City in the 1870s, during the so-called Gilded Age. Newland Archer has the perfect life. He is rich, young, good looking and member of the New York High Society. Newland is engaged to a lovely, delightful girl, May Welland and later they get married. When her cousin (Ellen Olenska), comes back from Europe, her presence threatens their happiness as Newland develops feelings for her... Wharton manages to dissect the hypocrisy of a society where customs and position take center stage.

Light-skinned black woman Irene Redfield encounters an old childhood friend - Claire- who is now "passing" as a white woman. Claire is married to a racist white man, who doesn't know she has African American blood. In spite of the danger of being found out by her husband and society at large; she finds herself helplessly drawn to Irene's world... "Passing" is a fascinating listening experience on many simultaneous levels.

"Idylls of the King" is a series of twelve narrative poems which recite the legend of King Arthur, his knights, his love for Guinevere and her tragic betrayal of him, and the rise and fall of Arthur's kingdom. The whole work recounts Arthur's attempt and failure to lift up mankind and create a perfect kingdom, from his coming to power to his death at the hands of the traitor Mordred. Individual poems detail the deeds of various knights, including Lancelot, Geraint, Galahad, and Balin and Balan, and also Merlin and the Lady of the Lake.

Carmilla is a Gothic novel by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. The story is told by a young woman preyed upon by a female vampire named Carmilla, later discovered to be Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (Carmilla is an anagram of Mircalla). Laura, one of the two central characters, recounts, beginning with her childhood in a "picturesque and solitary" castle in Styria, where she lives with her father, a wealthy English widower retired from service to the Austrian Empire.

Jane Eyre follows the emotions and experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr. Rochester, the Byronic master of Thornfield Hall. Jane spent her childhood living with her uncle and aunt at Gateshead Hall, where she was emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins.

"The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy" is a children's book which makes the stories of Homer's epic poems The Odyssey and The Iliad familiar to the young. By using narrative threads from the ancient poems, the author Padraic Colum presents to younger generation the legendary world of Ancient Greece.

This collection includes all surviving letters of Jane Austen. This is a chance for all her biggest admires to have a look inside the mind of the witty genius. Most of Austen's letters are addressed to her sister Cassandra, but there are also letters to her brothers, friends, and to her nieces and nephews, as well as publishers. The trained ear will recognize almost instantly the prose-voice of the great author.

"Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave" is the story of an African prince who ultimately ends up in Surinam as a slave. It is also a touching love story of the prince and his one and only love, despite the common practice of polygamy. Tragedy and revenge, or tragic revenge, if you will, is also another strong component of the story. A fascinating tale, both historically and emotionally.

The Odd Women is set in a smoggy London, with heroines ranging from the idealistic, financially independent Mary Barfoot; to the Madden sisters who struggle to get by in low paying jobs... Being a fascinating, trailblazing and early work of feminism and social realism, this novel reflects the important sexual and cultural issues of the late nineteenth century. Here women are portrayed as "odd" and marginal in relation to an ideal.

"Behind a Mask, or A Woman's Power" is a novel written by Louisa May Alcott. The story follows Jean Muir, the cunning governess of the rich Coventry family. With skillful manipulation, Jean Muir obtains the love, admiration, and eventually the fortune of the Coventry family. Of all her stories of femme fatales, "Woman's Power or Behind a Mask" is considered Alcott's chef-d'oeuvre in the genre of sensation fiction.

Charity Royal is bored with her life in the small town of North Dormer. She was born to poor parents from "up the Mountain" who gave her up to the town's learned person, Lawyer Royall, but she still dreams of an even better and more exciting life outside of the town. She secures a job at North Dormer's library, a job that she is neglectful of, in an attempt to save up money so she could eventually leave the town and Mr. Royall's care.

Wanting nothing to do with men, a beautiful young woman founds a women's university, where no man can enter. But as the master Tennyson writes, "Life is brief but love is long"; love will find a way; and the prince to whom the young woman was betrothed in infancy disguises himself into a woman and enters the grounds... This classic narrative poem continues to captivate generation after generation of listeners and it is no wonder why: "Better not be at all than not be noble."

The story is set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts, where a visiting engineer recounts the story of his encounter with Ethan Frome, a man with a past of thwarted dreams and wishes. The amassed longing of Frome ends in an ironic turn of events. His original impressions are based on his observations of Frome going about his everyday tasks in Starkfield, and something about him catches the eye and curiosity of the visitor, but no one in the town seems interested in revealing many details about the man or his history - or perhaps they are not able to.

The Fifth Queen is a historical novel. It tells the story of Katharine Howard's arrival at the Court of Henry VIII, her eventual marriage to the king, and her death. Katharine Howard is presented in the first book as a genuine Roman Catholic, penniless, young noblewoman escorted by her fiery cousin Thomas Culpeper. By accident, she comes to the attention of the king, in a minor way at first, is helped to a position as a lady in waiting for the then bastard Lady Mary, Henry's eldest daughter, by her old Latin tutor Nicholas Udal, a spy for Thomas Cromwell.

Molly Gibson is a young girl who has been raised by her widowed father. During a visit to the local aristocratic "great house" of Lord and Lady Cumnor, she loses her way in the estate and falls asleep under a tree. When she wakes up, she gets distressed at the thought of spending the night at the mansion, but to her relief, her father arrives to collect her. Seven years later, Molly is an attractive and rather unworldly young woman, which arouses the interest of one of her father's apprentices.

"News From Nowhere" centers around the encounter between a visitor from the nineteenth century, William Guest, and a decentralized and humane socialist future without class segregation and with direct democracy without governmental empowerment. Inspired by the work of John Ruskin and Karl Marx; this novel is not only a declaration of egalitarian principles but a great early contribution to the utopian genre. This work could be seen as a kind of utopian counterpart to George Orwell's renowned and deeply pessimistic, dystopian novel 1984.

The story of "The Glimpses of the Moon" is set in the early 1920s. Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are both scarcely getting by in the rich social circles they move in and they can't afford to get married. They make an agreement. They will get married and stay together for as long as they can but when they run out of money, they are free to divorce each other. The book continues Edith Wharton's inspection of New York society.