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  The Lifted Veil

  George Eliot

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  Mary Anne Evans was born on 22nd November 1819 at Nuneaton in Warwickshire, England, 
   
  As a child she was a committed reader and brimmed with intelligence. Her father felt that her lack of physical beauty might not bring her the best selection of suitors in marriage and therefore thought a good education, rarely afforded to women at the time, might be the best path for her. 
   
  From the age of five to nine, she boarded with her sister at Miss Latham's school in Attleborough, and then Mrs. Wallington's school in Nuneaton, until she was thirteen, and it was to be Miss Franklin's school in Coventry until she was sixteen.  
   
  In 1835 her mother died and she returned home to keep house for her father and her siblings, and with it the cessation of her formal education. 
   
  Over the next decade she nurtured her literary ambitions but doubts on religious faith brought tensions with her father who was not enamored at the free-willed liberals she was associating with. 
   
  Despite this her first major literary work was completing an English translation of Strauss's ‘The Life of Jesus’ in 1846. 
   
  Her father died in 1849 and Eliot was able to begin a new life.  After a few months in Geneva she moved to London to work at the Westminster Review where she published many articles and essays.  In 1851 Mary Anne or Marian, as she liked to be called, met George Henry Lewes, and in 1854 they moved in together; a somewhat scandalous situation as he was already married.    
   
  Her view on literature had taken some time to coalesce but with the publication of parts of ‘Scenes From A Clerical Life’ in 1858 she knew she wanted to be a novelist.   
   
  Under the pseudonym of George Eliot that we know so well ‘Adam Bede’ was published in 1859 followed by her other great novels; ‘Mill on the Floss’, ‘Silas Marner’ and ‘Middlemarch’.         
   
  Her talents also extended to both small canons of poetry and short stories. 
   
  ‘The Lifted Veil’ is a both a beautiful story and typical of Eliot’s formidable powers of writing. 
   
  George Eliot died on 22nd December 1880 at Chelsea in London. She was 61.  She is buried at Highgate Cemetery.

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  The Woman at the Store

  Katherine Mansfield

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  New Zealand-born Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction and a close associate of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.'The Woman at the Store' is a sinister tale about a woman living at a remote farm and general store in New Zealand with her small daughter and sheepdog...and a dark secret...A Red Door Consulting production.

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  The Death of Halpin Frayser

  Ambrose Bierce

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  "Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842 - 1914) was an American writer famous for his dark and cynical writings, which earned him the nickname ""Bitter Bierce"".  He is famous also for his mysterious demise. He wrote a letter to a friend, which he closed by saying, ""As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination,"" and then he vanished without a trace, his disappearance becoming one of the most famous in American literary history. ""The Death of Halpin Frayser"" is a deeply disturbing tale, written with the sense of a terrible nightmare in which a man is horribly attacked in a wood by the undead animated corpse of his dead mother. "

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  Le Grand Meaulnes [The Wanderer]

  Henri Alain-Fournier

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  Le Grand Meaulnes is one of the great classics of French literature, a mysterious, even impressionistic tale of adolescence in the French countryside in the dying years of the 19th century.A teenager, Agustin Meaulnes, arrives in a country school, and his strong personality immediately affects its rural atmosphere, especially in the eyes of his younger school companion, the 15 year old François. He is dubbed 'le grand Meaulnes', and he lives up to his reputation by going missing for a few days. He says little about his adventure on his return. But François eventually discovers that Meaulnes stumbled upon a strange party held at an unknown chateau, and became enmeshed in the lives of the beautiful young Yvonne de Galais and her brother Frantz.Love, confusion, the urgency of young passion propels these three along unpredictable paths, observed anxiously by François, who desperately wants to help solve and resolve the mysteries. But Meaulnes and Frantz are driven by their own emotions along a trajectory which is anything but simple and straight.Le Grand Meaulnes, regarded by John Fowles as 'the greatest novel of adolescence in European literature' has cast a remarkable spell on successive many generations.In turn elliptical, impressionist, hopeful, haunting, Le Grand Meaulnes made an immediate impression on the French public when it was first published in 1913 (a year before its author died in the First World War) and swiftly gained a permanent place in European literature. The translation by Françoise Delisle has been revised for this recording.

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  Jane Eyre

  Charlotte Brontë

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  This classic story shows how a young woman can overcome adversity and find true happiness. It is a story of passionate love, travail, and final triumph.Orphaned at an early age, Jane Eyre leads a lonely life until she finds work as a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she meets the mysterious Mr. Rochester and sees a ghostly woman who roams the halls by night. The relationship between the heroine and Mr. Rochester is only one episode, albeit the most important, in a detailed fictional autobiography in which the author transmuted her own experience into high art. In this work, the plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance but possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit, and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer, and the rigid social order that circumscribes her life and position.

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  Patchwork Girl of Oz The [The...

  L. Frank Baum

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  Ojo, known as Ojo the Unlucky, lives in poverty with his laconic uncle Unc Nunkie in the woods of the Munchkin Country in Oz. They visit their neighbor, the magician Dr. Pipt who is about to complete the six-year process of preparing the magical Powder of Life, which can bring inanimate objects to life.

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