Prospero’s Isle

Most recent articles

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  "A Journal of the Plague Year 1665 in London" by Daniel Defoe

  30 October, by Daniel Defoe

  A dramatic, very articulate, very compassionate and very precious “virtual memoir”, recounting in vivid detail the unfolding and the climax of the Great Plague of 1665 that devastated London – the world’s biggest city at the time – by the author of the immortal Robinson Crusoe [1].
  A thoroughly researched and well-documented account written from the point of view and under the signature of Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe, who had lived through that cataclysmic event – Daniel was 5 years old at the (…)

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  "Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov" (1921)

  25 October, by Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Kuprin and Ivan Bunin

  A moving and insightful series of recollections of life and conversations with the great story-teller and playwright by three writers and friends who knew him well, first published in New York in 1921.
  Translated by Samuel Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf.
  (19,200 words) CONTENTS
  1. ANTON CHEKHOV, FRAGMENTS OF RECOLLECTIONS by Maxim Gorky First published in Russia in 1906.
  2. TO CHEKHOV’S MEMORY by Aleksandr Kuprin First published in this English translation in 1921.
  3. A. P. CHEKHOV (…)

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  "Dracula" by Bram Stoker (1897)

  21 October, by Bram Stoker

  After a very striking and very scary start indeed, in Dracula’s castle in the mysterious mountains of Romania recounted by one of his captives there, the scene shifts to England and to the diaries of his friends, male and female, and the pace slows somewhat. But the essential elements are still very much there: the ever-present and ever-changing and very menacing Dracula, the three evanescent females with very sharp teeth indeed, the mysterious trauma that seizes the strange man’s victims, (…)

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  "The Egoist" by George Meredith (1879)

  3 October, by George Meredith

  Sir Willoughby is an enormously wealthy, well-educated and handsome young scion of an ancient family and he is immensely proud of himself: he is an admitted egoist and the whole book is dedicated to getting the reader and especially the key three young women in his life to penetrate his fearsome outer defenses to see through to his true, rather brutal, essential selfishness not to say shallowness.
  Based on elegant, brilliant dialogues and framed in the author’s quite unique style of (…)

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  "North and South" by Elizabeth Gaskell (1854)

  1 October, by Elizabeth Gaskell

  Margaret Hale is a 19-year-old who’s been living in the posh Harley Street quarters of her first cousin in London for a long nine years when her father, a clergyman in a picturesque southern country village, loses his faith and takes up work teaching classics to gentlemen in the very industrial town of Milton (read Manchester) in the north. When Margaret and her mother accompany him up there they all have a major culture shock, and Margaret in particular is distressed by the lowly status and (…)

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  "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)

  29 September, by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  One of the most important books ever published in the U.S.A., a story about the plight of the enslaved black population in the south – and the legal obligation for northern states to return escaped slaves back to their southern “owners” – powerfully written by a convinced abolitionist, a woman whose moral indignity at the outrage of the institution that was so movingly recounted in this famous book that it played a significant role in the formation of public opinion in the north in the years (…)

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  "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" by Edgar Allan Poe (1837)

  22 September, by Edgar Allan Poe

  A young student decides to embark on a whaling vessel against the wishes of his family and with the collusion of a close friend, the son of the ship’s captain, he’s hidden in the hold of the ship with the intention of coming out after a few days once the ship is too far from shore to turn back. But the boyish adventure does not go to plan at all at all, as the young fellows did not take into account the possibility of a mutiny, of bloodshed galore, of shipwreck and hunger and thirst to the (…)

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  "The Last of the Mohicans" by James Fennimore Cooper (1826)

  15 September, by James Fennimore Cooper

  An American classic, an historical novel centred on the infamous Fort Henry massacre in 1757 during the Seven Years War when the English forces in that besieged fort surrendered to their French opponent Montcalm on the condition of safe conduct for their men and civilians – a condition that was immediately ignored by the Iroquois and Huron allies of Montcalm who massacred many hundreds of women and children as they left the fort.
  At the beginning of the story the two lovely (…)

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  "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley (1818)

  8 September, by Mary Shelley

  The original Frankenstein story about a Swiss chemist [1] in a German [2] university finally succeeding in understanding the secret of life and of actually developing a living human being – rather oversize and not what you would call a good-looker, but in fact most intelligent and capable of extraordinary physical and even intellectual feats. The scientist lives to bitterly regret his innovation and comes to a bad end trying to stop the monster from committing yet more evil deeds…
  Written (…)

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  "The Sufferings of Young Werther" by Goethe (1774)

  1 September, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Goethe’s famous first novel about the plight of the intense and dreamy Werther, the artisically-minded lover of nature and Homer and Ossian who’s passionately in love with Charlotte, the sparkling bride-to-be and then wife of another.
  Werther’s drama and sufferings form the framework for this book whose sensitive, soulful hero was a founding figure for the Romantic movement throughout Europe.
  A selection of characteristic citations from this seminal work can be seen below. 42,600 words. (…)