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  Agnes Grey

  Anne Brontë

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  Written when women-and workers generally-had few rights in England, Agnes Grey exposes the brutal inequities of the rigid class system in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Agnes comes from a respectable middle-class family, but their financial reverses have forced her to seek work as a governess. Pampered and protected at home, she is unprepared for the harsh reality of a governess's life. At the Bloomfields and, later, the Murrays, she suffers under the snobbery and sadism of the selfish, self-indulgent upper-class adults and the shrieking insolence of their spoiled children. Worse, the unique social and economic position of a governess-"beneath" her employers but "above" their servants-condemns her to a life of loneliness.Less celebrated than her older sisters, Charlotte and Emily, Anne Brontë was also less interested in spinning wildly symbolic, romantic tales and more determined to draw realistic images of conditions in Victorian England that needed changing. While Charlotte's Jane Eyre features a governess who eventually and improbably marries her employer, Agnes Grey deals with the actual experiences of middle-class working women, experiences Anne had herself endured during her hateful tenure as a governess.

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  Unexpected Fare A Tale in Five...

  Maxwell Gray

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  Mary Gleed Tuttiett was born and brought up in Newport on the Isle of Wight on 11th December 1846.   
   
  She was largely self-educated but of determined character to achieve something with her life.  As a young woman she travelled in England and Switzerland working as a governess despite bouts of ill-health.  During her writing career her health deteriorated, mainly due to asthma and rheumatism, to such an extent that she was unable to leave her bed for more than a few hours a day. 
   
  Mary began her literary career by contributing essays, poems, articles, and short stories to various periodicals of the times.  In common with several other women of the time she wrote under a male pseudonym, that of Maxwell Gray, and which in literary terms at least, has removed any trace of her life as Mary.   
   
  Her first novel, ‘The Broken Tryst’, arrived in 1879 to little attention or sales.  Mary’s first critical and popular success did not arrive until 1886 with the novel ‘The Silence of Dean Maitland’, an unorthodox ecclesiastical story which was to be later adapted for the stage and screen.  With this recognition came a far more prolific output with several of her other works set in a fictionalised Isle of Wight.  As well as novels there were collections of short stories and several poetry anthologies. 
   
  Mary was strongly supportive of women’s rights and the suffragist cause and was one of several writers who petitioned in support of the Women’s Suffrage Bill in 1910, and she wove these and other social themes into several of her novels.   
   
  After her father's death in 1895, she moved to London and remained there until her own death on 23rd September 1923, aged 76. 
   
  Her short story ‘An Unexpected Fare’ is a classic fish out-of-water story.  A rich, entitled young man has designs on a young woman of a class below his.  Wanting to find out more about her he takes on the job of a cabbie, common accent and all, as a way to discover more.

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  Sons and Lovers (Argo Classics)

  D. H. Lawrence

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  William Collins Books and Decca Records are proud to present ARGO Classics, a historic catalogue of classic fiction read by some of the world’s most renowned voices. Originally released as vinyl records, these expertly abridged and remastered stories are now available to download for the first time. 
  Provocative and sensual, this is the story of one man torn between the love for his mother and his desire for two very different women. 
  Sons and Lovers is a compelling exploration of sexual awakening and the clash of generations set in a Nottinghamshire mining town. 
  Beloved and acclaimed star of screen and stage Sir Ian McKellen provides a thrilling reading, capturing the freshness and intensity of DH Lawrence’s writing. 
  This rural romance, a literary masterpiece, is a top pick for readers who appreciate the complexities of relationships. The small town setting further enhances the depth of the narrative, making Sons and Lovers one of the best in its genre. 
  For fans of James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Bram Stoker (Dracula), Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), and Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn).

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  Baffling Beasts - 15 Tales of...

  Walter de la Mare, Arlton Eadie,...

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  Fifteen horror stories about strange beings and behaviours that defy conventional definitions. 
  Contents: 
  Warning Wings by Arlton Eadie (Weird Tales, 1929) 
  A seemingly insignificant white moth. 
  Mother of Toads by Clark Ashton Smith (WT, 1938) 
  An unusual witch. 
  The Destroying Horde by Donald Wandrei (WT, 1935) 
  The first BLOB story? 
  Caterpillars by E. F. Benson (The Room in the Tower, 1912) 
  Terrible things in an Italian villa. 
  The Urbanite by Ewen Whyte (WT, 1950) 
  The great city is never still. 
  Rats by F. A. M. Webster (At Dead of Night, 1931) 
  A plague of rats. 
  The Malignant Invader by F. B. Long (WT, 1932) 
  A creature from the bowels of the earth. 
  The Horror in the Museum by H. P. Lovecraft (WT, 1933) 
  A private wax museum that specialises in the grotesque. 
  My Father, the Cat by H. Slesar (Fantastic Universe, 1957) 
  A most unusual cat. 
  The Seeking Thing by Janet Hirsch (Magazine of Horror, 1964) 
  Something in the middle of the road. 
  They by R. B. Johnson (WT, 1936) 
  They dwell in Dead Man's Canyon. 
  The Hyena by Robert E. Howard (WT, 1928) 
  A man with an unusual ability. 
  Sredni Vashtar by Saki (The Chronicles of Clovis, 1911) 
  A secret in the garden shed. 
  Demons of the Film Colony by Theodore LeBerthon (WT, 1932) 
  A tale of 'Dracula' and 'Frankenstein'. 
  A:B:O. by Walter de la Mare (Cornhill, 1896) 
  The excavation of a metallic chest.

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  Foreword - A Selection from the...

  John Updike

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  The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories reflect so accurately, life was still unsettling, and Updike chronicles telling moments both joyful and painful. The texts are taken from his recent omnibus, The Early Stories, 1953-1975. 
  In describing how he wrote these stories in a small, rented, smoke-filled office in Ipswitch, Massachusetts, he says, "I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another, in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me -- to give the mundane its beautiful due."

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  The Beauties

  Anton Chekhov

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  One great example of Chekhov's minimalism is found in The Beauties, a very short "story" - I use the term loosely, because it is really just two snapshots, two unrelated anecdotes in which a man describes seeing true beauty in two different women. These women are imperfect, yet enigmatically alluring.
  Chekhov's genius lies in the way he manages to convey with such apparent effortlessness a profound sense of the mystery of beauty, and of the sadness of those who observe and think. The narrator of this apparently inconsequential tale fixes on exactly the right details, from a myriad of possible ones, to strike at the heart. It's a masterpiece of minimalism.

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