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  The Fiddler - From their pens to...

  Herman Melville

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  Herman Melville was born in New York City on 1st August 1819.   
  At the age of 7 Melville contracted scarlet fever which permanently diminished his eyesight. Add this to a contemporary description of being "very backwards in speech and somewhat slow in comprehension" and his opportunities for success seemed limited. 
  His father died when he was 12 leaving the family in very straitened times. 2 years later Melville took a job in a bank and followed up with a failed stint as a surveyor. He went to sea and travelled across to Liverpool and then to the Pacific on adventures which included a mutiny, being jailed and falling in love with a South Pacific beauty. He was also a figure of opposition to the coercion of native Hawaiians to the Christian religion.  These experiences helped provide the novels ‘Typee’, ‘Omoo’, and ‘White-Jacket’. 
  By 1851 his ambitious masterpiece, ‘Moby Dick’, was ready to be published.  It never sold out its initial print run of 3,000 and Melville’s earnings on his masterpiece was a mere $556.37. 
  In succeeding years his reputation waned, life was increasingly difficult.  His family was growing and a stable income was essential. Melville took the advice of friends to try public lecturing, as others had, to increase his revenues. He embarked on three successful lecture tours, speaking on Roman statuary and sightseeing in Rome.  
  In 1876 he was at last able to publish privately his 16,000 line epic poem ‘Clarel’. It was to no avail.  The book had an initial printing of 350 copies, but sales failed miserably. 
  It was only in late 1885 that Melville was at last able to retire after his wife inherited several legacies, enough to provide them with a reasonable income. 
  Herman Melville, novelist, poet, short story writer and essayist, died at his home on 28th September 1891 from cardiovascular disease.

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  Home Life Relayed - BBC presents...

  E M Delafield

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  Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, née de la Pasture, and more commonly known as E M Delafield, was born in Steyning, Sussex on 9th June 1890.   
   
  Raised in the fading years of the Victorian era with its Empire and strict moral codes Delafield, not yet married at twenty-one, joined a French religious order, in Belgium, but soon decided that this was a totally wrong choice for her.   
   
  Her next challenge was her work during the horror of the First World War.  Delafield decided to take up a position as a nurse in a Voluntary Aid Detachment in Exeter.  It was whilst here that she managed to write her first novel, ‘Zella Sees Herself’.   
   
  With the end of the war new opportunities were sought and she now took up a position for the South-West Region of the Ministry of National Service in Bristol.  With it came enough time to write two more novels: ‘The War Workers’ (1918) and ‘The Pelicans’ (1918).   
   
  On 17th July 1919, she married Colonel Arthur Paul Dashwood, OBE, an engineer responsible for building the massive docks at Hong Kong Harbour.  The marriage produced two children; Lionel and Rosamund.  That same year her fourth novel, ‘Consequences’, was published.   
   
  The couple spent their early years in Malaya but returned to England to live in Croyle, an old house in Kentisbeare, Devon.  Delafield continued to collect responsibilities and organise whatever she could.  At the initial meeting of the Kentisbeare Women's Institute, Delafield was unanimously elected president, and also became a Justice of the Peace, raised the children and, of course, continued to write her best-selling novels.   
   
  Her greatest work is undoubtedly the largely autobiographical ‘Diary of a Provincial Lady’, which is a simply structured journal of the life of an upper-middle class Englishwoman, living mostly in a Devon village of the 1930s.  It spawned several best-selling sequels.  Her works also includes stage and radio plays, film scripts and short stories.  
   
  After the death of her son in 1940, her health began to markedly decline.    
   
  E M Delafield died on 2nd December 1943 after collapsing whilst giving a lecture in Oxford.  She was 53.

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  St Pete Academy of Real Magic:...

  Jerry Banfield

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  If you have ever felt that reality is more flexible, more alive, and more responsive than most people admit, this book is for you. 
  In St. Pete Academy of Real Magic: The Welcome Lecture, I invite you into a fictional world set in St. Petersburg, Florida that may not be fiction at all. I speak to you as if you are one of the first eight students enrolled in a yearlong private academy where the central lesson is simple and radical: you are the creator of your reality. From that foundation, I explore what becomes possible when you stop seeing yourself as powerless and start looking at your life as something you are consciously shaping. 
  This is not a fantasy novel about wands, spells, and magical bloodlines. It is a grounded, provocative, and highly personal welcome lecture about real magic as I see it: telepathy, remote viewing, intuition, conscious creation, life after death, communication with those who have passed on, transforming your health, reshaping your finances, and learning to see meaning in everything you experience. I share the stories, examples, and worldview behind the Academy, including how I believe I manifested this very reality into existence. 
  I wrote this as fiction so you can enter it with curiosity, imagination, and freedom. You can read it as a story, as a thought experiment, or as something much more personal. Whether you are skeptical, open-minded, spiritually adventurous, or quietly convinced there is far more going on here than we are taught, this book is meant to stretch your sense of what is possible. 
  If you are ready to question the limits of ordinary life and step into a world where your thoughts, choices, and desires matter far more than you have been told, welcome to the St. Pete Academy of Real Magic.

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  Tales from Jókai - Stories of...

  Mór Jókai

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  Hungarian stories by the writer who was his country's most popular novelist for fifty years - the Turkish frontier, the plains, the revolution of 1848 in which he had a part. Jókai wrote over a hundred novels and Hungary read all of them. This edition binds 55 plates with the text, among them paintings by Edvard Munch, Hokusai and Saturnin Świerzyński, plus one restored and coloured illustration; R. Nisbet Bain's translation.

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  Two Tales From Herman Melville -...

  Herman Melville

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  Two Tales From Herman Melville includes "The Lightning-Rod Man" and "The Bell-Tower." After spending the summer of 1853 in the Berkshire Mountains, where he supposedly had a real life encounter with a lightning-rod salesman, Melville published "The Lightning-Rod Man." At the end of this short story, the lightning-rod salesman is exposed for the fraud that he is. However, that will not keep his successors from fanning out to the Middle West, where lightning storms abound and farmers were gullible. On another level, the story can be interpreted as a confrontation between Good and Evil. Through description and diction, the narrator is understood as a follower of God, someone who believes in The Almighty watching over him. On the other hand, the lightning-rod man is seen as a negative character, someone who only has faith in the product he's peddling. "The Bell-Tower," published in 1856, is the story of an eccentric architect named Bannadonna and his quest to build a magnificent bell-tower. As building progresses, local townspeople begin to hear of mysterious occurrences in the tower, leading to a suspenseful conclusion.

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  Christmas Eve at a Cornish Manor...

  Clara Venn

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  The bookshelves of British literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors.  From these Isles their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure.  Among them is Clara Venn.

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