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  The Diary of A Plain Girl - A...

  Amy Levy

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  Amy Levy was born in London, England in 1861, the second of seven in a fairly wealthy Anglo-Jewish family. The children of the family read and participated in secular literary activities becoming firmly integrated into Victorian life. 
   
  Amy was educated at Brighton High School, Brighton, and studied at Newnham College, Cambridge; she was the first Jewish student when she arrived in 1879, but left after four terms. 
   
  But her writing career was to begin early; her poem "Ida Grey" appearing when she was only fourteen. Her stories "Cohen of Trinity" and "Wise in Their Generation," were published by Oscar Wilde in his magazine “Women's World," and are considered among her best. 
   
  Her first novel Romance of a Shop, written in 1888 is based on four sisters who experience the pleasures and hardships of running a business in London during the 1880s. This was followed by Reuben Sachs (also 1888) and concerned with Jewish identity and mores in the England of her time and therefore somewhat controversial); 
   
  Her other writings reveal feminist concerns; Xantippe and Other Verses, from 1881 includes a poem in the voice of Socrates's wife; the volume A Minor Poet and Other Verse from 1884 has dramatic monologues and lyric poems. 
   
  In 1886, Levy began a series of essays on Jewish culture and literature for the Jewish Chronicle, including The Ghetto at Florence, The Jew in Fiction, Jewish Humour and Jewish Children. 
   
  That same year while travelling in Florence she met writer Vernon Lee. It is generally assumed they fell in love and this inspired the poem ‘To Vernon Lee’. 
   
  Her final book of poems, A London Plane-Tree from 1889, shows the beginnings of the influence of French symbolism. 
   
  Despite many friendships and active life, Amy had suffered for a long time with major depression and this, together with her growing deafness, led her to commit suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide on September 10, 1889, at the age of twenty-seven

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  The Gods of Mars

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

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  The story is set in the fictional world of Barsoom, which is based on the planet Mars. The novel tells the story of John Carter, a Civil War veteran who is transported to Barsoom, where he becomes embroiled in a conflict between the Tharks and the humanoid red Martian race. Carter finds himself with superhuman strength and abilities due to the lower gravity of Mars, and he uses these abilities to help the Tharks defeat their enemies.

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  On the Study of Words

  Richard Chenevix Trench

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  Where words come from and what they carry: Trench takes ordinary English — knave, villain, pagan, sincere — and shows the history fossilised inside each one, and what it says about the people who made it. In 1857 he read a paper on the deficiencies of English dictionaries that set in motion the project which became the Oxford English Dictionary; he was Archbishop of Dublin, and these lectures are why the OED exists.

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  Our American Cousin

  Tom Taylor

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  We rely on your support to help us keep producing beautiful, free, and unrestricted editions of literature for the digital age. Will you support our efforts with a donation ? Our American Cousin is a three-act play written by English playwright Tom Taylor . The play opened in London in 1858 but quickly made its way to the U.S. and premiered at Laura Keene's Theatre in New York City later that year. It remained popular in the U.S. and England for the next several decades. Its most notable claim to fame, however, is that it was the play U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was watching on April 14, 1865 when he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, who used his knowledge of the script to shoot Lincoln during a more raucous scene. The play is a classic Victorian farce with a whole range of stereotyped characters, business, and many entrances and exits. The plot features a boorish but honest American cousin who travels to the aristocratic English countryside to claim his inheritance, and then quickly becomes swept up in the family's affairs. An inevitable rescue of the family's fortunes and of the various damsels in distress ensues. Our American Cousin was originally written as a farce for an English audience, with the laughs coming mostly at the expense of the naive American character. But after it moved to the U.S. it was eventually recast as a comedy where English caricatures like the pompous Lord Dundreary soon became the primary source of hilarity. This early version, published in 1869, contains fewer of that character's nonsensical adages, which soon came to be known as "Dundrearyisms," and for which the play eventually gained much of its popular appeal.

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  The Poor Clare

  Elizabeth Gaskell

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  Originally written for Charles Dickens’ Household Words magazine, The Poor Clare is a dark, gothic short novel of thwarted love and a family curse that vividly illustrates the social tensions of Victorian England. 
  The intentional killing of a woman’s dog unleashes a torrent of rage. In her desire for revenge, the woman curses the dog’s killer: All that the murderer loves most, he will lose. 
  This haunting tale brilliantly demonstrates Elizabeth Gaskell’s understanding of the tensions between Catholics and Protestants and the harsh realities of class society.

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  Peter Pan

  Saviour Pirotta

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  Wendy knows that all children have to grow up... all apart from the magical Peter Pan! When Peter flies through the nursery window and invites Wendy and her brothers, John and Michael, to come to Never-Never-Land, they set off on the adventure of a lifetime. J. M. Barrie's best-loved tale of Lost Boys, mermaids, pirates and a boy who will never grow up has been retold and adapted for younger readers aged 6+. 
   
  ABOUT THE SERIES: Abridged and retold in modern English, Arcturus Easy-to-Read Classics make 16 classic stories accessible to readers as young as six, while retaining all the charm, atmosphere, and sense of adventure that made the original tales world-famous.

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