The narrator recounts the harsh upbringing of his godson Ernest Pontifex, son of a Church of England minister, the oppressive everyday religiosity of his family life, his difficult schooling, his career at Cambridge, his ordination, his floundering attempts to live in a working-class neighbourhood to better be able to bring them the good word, his fall into the depths and then his struggle to start a new life and to conciliate his new set of beliefs to the world around him.
Although (…)
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Novels
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"The Way of All Flesh" by Samuel Butler (1903)
21 August 2023, by Samuel Butler -
"The Red Badge of Courage" by Steven Crane (1895)
2 August 2023, by Steven CraneThe celebrated story of fear, anguish, cowardice and heroism in the American Civil War by the young twenty-four-year-old author Steven Crane (1871-1899] that has long since taken its rightful place as one of the finest American works of its time.
(46,000 words) An e-book is available for downloading below. TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. CHAPTER II. CHAPTER III. CHAPTER IV. CHAPTER V. CHAPTER VI. CHAPTER VII. CHAPTER VIII. CHAPTER IX. CHAPTER X. CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER XIII. (…) -
"Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy (1895)
30 July 2023, by Thomas HardyHardy’s masterful last novel, a forceful, wide-ranging and subtly-erudite overview of the social foibles of the late Victorian society (we are in the 1880s in the south of England and in Oxford) as Hardy saw them, notably: a) the class barriers preventing labouring-class young people from being admitted into institutions of higher learning; b) the rigidity of the marriage institution, whereby people are forced by law and by intense social pressures to live out the rest of the days with what (…)
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"Tess of the D’Urbervilles" by Thomas Hardy (1891)
6 July 2023, by Thomas HardyHardy’s penultimate and probably his best-known work, first published four years before his final and equally scandalous novel Jude the Obscure.
Here the angle that grated the most with his contemporary public and critics (Victorian morals and rules were then at the peak of their sway over the English-speaking world’s mindset) was the wanton way whereby the female heroine Jude gets herself into trouble by foolishly falling to the spiel of a local socially and physically desirable sportsman, (…) -
"Kidnapped" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1893)
3 July 2023, by Robert Louis StevensonThe young hero of this very interesting adventure story does get kidnapped early on as one expects from the title, but rapidly escapes from the ship which has absconded him off the west coast of Scotland, and spends the rest of the book wandering around the Highlands a) trying to find someone who can understand a word of English; (b) getting very seriously mixed up in the Jacobite rebellion raging at the time; c) hiding from the Crown troops who are actively hunting him as a murder suspect; (…)
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"The Mayor of Casterbridge" by Thomas Hardy (1886)
30 June 2023, by Thomas HardyThe most striking scene in this novel is right at its beginning, where the then-20-year-old central character and future mayor gets drunk in a tavern and - get this - sells his wife and baby daughter to a passing sailor! We then follow his ups and downs, especially the latter, twenty years later when his past starts catching up with him after he has become mayor and one of the town’s leading merchants. Set in the south-east region of "Wessex" (a fictionalised transposition of Hardy’s native (…)
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"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884)
24 June 2023, by Mark TwainMark Twain’s sequel to the ever-so-charming Tom Sawyer, this time written more for an adult public, where Huck recounts at first hand his harrowing river-trip down the Mississippi River after escaping from the clutches of his ultra-violent, brutish father into the heartland of the Deep South with an escaped black slave.
The scenes of everyday nightmarish violence in the frontier towns of the South are as striking to us today as they must have appeared to be to the East Coast readers of (…) -
"The Portrait of a Lady" by Henry James (1881)
20 June 2023, by Henry JamesA well-rounded, in-depth exploration of the inner psyche of Isabel Archer, a liberated and very independent-minded young American woman, discovering England and Italy and the complexities of life in the eighteen-eighties. The author’s somewhat verbose style, his inherent difficulty in summing things up in a nutshell, and the quasi-absence of much of a story line – other than the tribulations of the heroine’s sentimental adventures - make this a rather hard read at times, but perseverance is (…)
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"Washington Square" by Henry James (1880)
27 May 2023, by Henry JamesA very smooth, handsome, sophisticated treasure-hunting idler exercises his considerable charm on Catherine, the daughter of a famous and quite well-to-do physician who moves into a splendid residence in the fashionable (we are in the early part of the 19th-Century) Washington Square, with the aid of the girl’s aunt who lives with her and her father and who has nothing else to do but meddle in the innocent – and awkward, unsophisticated, unworldly and unattractive – young woman and future (…)
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"The Return of the Native" by Thomas Hardy (1878)
24 May 2023, by Thomas HardyThis was the second of Hardy’s major novels (after Far From The Madding Crowd in 1874), set again in a rural community in a region of unfarmed and sparsely-populated semi-wild heaths in the south-west of England baptised Wessex by Hardy, closely resembling his own native Dorsetshire where he had been raised and where he had returned to settle down shortly before undertaking this deeply-felt novel of the intense inter-relationships and tensions between a man and his mother, between three men (…)