Prospero’s Isle

Most recent articles

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  LATEST ARTICLES

  27 May
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  "Washington Square" by Henry James (1880)

  27 May, by Henry James

  A 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, by Thomas Hardy

  This 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 (...)

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  "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain (1876)

  20 May, by Mark Twain

  The famous tale of growing up in grassroots America in the first part of the 19th Century, with two of the best-known characters in the whole of American fiction, the resourceful and imaginative Tom Sawyer and his adventurous, semi-wild bosom friend Huckleberry Finn.
  An American classic (although first published in England!) it was really intended for young people by its structure (anecdotes loosely linked together), its content matter (youthful escapades and high-jinks) and its style (...)

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  "Far From the Madding Crowd" by Thomas Hardy (1874)

  17 May, by Thomas Hardy

  This was the first of Hardy’s major works and his first major success, set in a pastoral setting [1] and centered on the yearnings of a farmer-shepherd after the lively and independent farm-owner heroine Bethsheeba.
  The novel has a huge amount of local colour, with a full set of country characters whose vernacular and often quite comical conversations and doings take up a considerable amount of the story, and its many dramatic countryside dramas do indeed tend to get the reader away from (...)

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  "Middlemarch" by George Eliot (1872)

  13 May, by George Eliot

  This big, complex, ambitious, very sophisticated novel is set in an almost claustrophobic provincial setting, where its great strength – the sharpness and intelligence of the dialogues and the conversations – are somewhat dampened by the just-about-mediocre or at least typically-provincial qualities of the main characters and their environment. But there is much, an awful lot, to be thankful for here, in addition to the generally elevated tone of the thinking and talking and writing; for (...)

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  "The Eustache Diamonds" by Anthony Trollope (1870)

  10 May, by Anthony Trollope

  One of Trollope’s best-known novels, beautifully delivered in his unmatchable, elegant and precise prose. The mess that Lady Eustace gets into with her fabulous diamonds provides T. with the framework for an examination of the mores and morals of the increasingly-crass society of his day that (of course) keeps the reader well engaged from start to end. The charm of his Barchester Towers is less present in this sharper social saga, but it is certainly another excellent example of Trollope’s (...)

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  "The Last Chronicle of Barset" by Anthony Trollope (1867)

  6 May, by Anthony Trollope

  This was the sixth and last novel in Trollop’s Barsetshire series, that began with the excellent The Warden and continued with his wonderful masterpiece, Barchester Towers. Surprise and delight, this final and most sober work in the series, on the quite eternal themes of honour and dishonour, of honesty and integrity and social opprobrium, of pride, poverty and self-respect, rises to the glorious heights of Barchester Towers thanks to the sparkle of Trollope’s prose, to his gift for (...)

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  "The Mill on the Floss" by George Eliot (1860)

  3 May, by George Eliot

  The most dramatic of all George Eliot’s novels (that quite unforgettable final scene!), this was her second novel, published when she was 40, so there’s nothing juvenile in the writing or plot, concentrated on the heroine’s intense relationships with three men (her brother, her suitable suitor, and her unsuitable lover). It is less intellectualising than the later Middlemarch (1872) but retains the country setting and nature-centred flavour of Adam Bede, written the previous year (she may (...)

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  "The Love Song of the Tomcat Murr" by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1821)

  30 April, by E. T. A. Hoffmann

  The account of his love affair with the lovely Miesmies by the very gifted tomcat Murr, who had been taught to read and write by his erudite master and who had then proceeded to write his autobiography, including this most delightful episode from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s wonderful masterwork “The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1821).” (2,400 words)
  Translated specially for this site An e-book, with the original text in an annex, is available for downloading below.
  The original text can (...)