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  The Canary

  Katherine Mansfield

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  A lonely woman's cherished canary, her only companion, dies, leaving her isolated once more.

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  Betty Brown the St Giles Orange...

  Hannah More

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  Hannah More was born on February 2nd, 1745 at Fishponds in the parish of Stapleton, near Bristol. She was the fourth of five daughters. 
  The City of Bristol, at that time, was a centre for slave-trading and Hannah would, over time, become one of its staunchest critics.  
  She was keen to learn, possessed a sharp intellect and was assiduous in studying.  Hannah first wrote in 1762 with The Search after Happiness (by the mid-1780s some 10,000 copies had been sold). 
  In 1767 Hannah became engaged to William Turner.  After six years, with no wedding in sight, the engagement was broken off.  Turner then bestowed upon her an annual annuity of £200.  This was enough to meet her needs and set her free to pursue a literary career.   
  Her first play, The Inflexible Captive, was staged at Bath in 1775. The famous David Garrick himself produced her next play, Percy, in 1777 as well as writing both the Prologue and Epilogue for it.  It was a great success when performed at Covent Garden in December of that year.  
  Hannah turned to religious writing with Sacred Dramas in 1782; it rapidly ran through nineteen editions. These and the poems Bas-Bleu and Florio (1786) mark her gradual transition to a more serious and considered view of life. 
  Hannah contributed much to the newly-founded Abolition Society including, in February 1788, her publication of Slavery, a Poem recognised as one of the most important of the abolition period.   
  Her work now became more evangelical.  In the 1790s she wrote several Cheap Repository Tracts which covered moral, religious and political topics and were both for sale or distributed to literate poor people.  The most famous is, perhaps, The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, describing a family of incredible frugality and contentment. Two million copies of these were circulated, in one year. 
  In 1789, she purchased a small house at Cowslip Green in Somerset. She was instrumental in setting up twelve schools in the area by 1800. 
  She continued to oppose slavery throughout her life, but at the time of the Abolition Bill of 1807, her health did not permit her to take as active a role in the movement as she had done in the late 1780s, although she maintained a correspondence with Wilberforce and others.  
  In July 1833, the Bill to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire passed in the House of Commons, followed by the House of Lords on August 1st. 
  Hannah More died on September 7th, 1833.

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  Battling the Bluestocking

  Martha Keyes

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  Phineas Donovan is possessed of a sharp intellect. Fresh from Cambridge, he obtains a generous live-in position as tutor for the son of the wealthy Lord Bettencourt. If he can prove his value, he has hopes of being given the patronage of his employer, allowing him to take up a position as vicar. There, he can pursue his intellectual endeavors in peace and relative financial comfort. In her humble but informed opinion, Lady Sarah Danneville is possessed of an even sharper intellect. If anyone should be tutoring her younger brother, it is she, not the reserved, bespectacled gentleman her father has employed to do the job. He is not fit to instruct a Danneville of Bettencourt. But as Sarah works to undermine him, Mr. Donovan shows more pluck than she expects, not to mention that he harbors a secret hobby that would be laughable if it weren’t so dreadfully unsophisticated. If she can use this secret against him, she can finally persuade her father she is more than bait to lure a prosperous match. Now, if only she can avoid being drawn into the dearth of sophistication—and Mr. Donovan’s eyes—herself. Battling the Bluestocking is the third in Martha Keyes's The Donovans regency-set romance series. Each book can be treated as a standalone.

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  Anton Chekhov - Six of the Best...

  Anton Chekhov

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  Six has always been a number we group things around – Six of the best, six of one half a dozen of another, six feet under, six pack, six degrees of separation and a sixth sense are but a few of the ways we use this number. 
   
  Such is its popularity that we thought it is also a very good way of challenging and investigating an author’s work to give width, brevity, humour and depth across six of their very best. 
   
  In this series we gather together authors whose short stories both rivet the attention and inspire the imagination to visit their gems in a series of six, to roam across an author’s legacy in a few short hours and gain a greater understanding of their writing and, of course, to be lavishly entertained by their ideas, their narrative and their way with words. 
   
  These stories can be surprising and sometimes at a tangent to what we expected, but each is fully formed and a marvellous adventure into the world and words of a literary master. 
   
   1 - Six of the Best - Anton Chekov - An Introduction 
  2 - Anton Chekhov - An Introduction 
  3 - The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov 
  4 - The Kiss by Anton Chekhov 
  5 - Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov 
  6 - Misery by Anton Chekhov 
  7 - The Student by Anton Chekhov 
  8 - Volodya by Anton Chekhov

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  Echoes of the Past - Collection...

  Uma Yoganand

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  Are you inspired by the lives of ordinary people around you? Read about how ordinary people have led extraordinary lives through grit and determination. 
  The book aims to communicate that the road to success is always under construction. It requires consistent effort, adaptability, patience, and unbreakable belief that, no matter the obstacles, there is always a path forward. 
  Have you heard about a Jungian? Follow Anita as she pursues her passion and travels to New York.  Read about Sampat, a journalist who seizes the opportunity of a lifetime to create the dream newspaper envisioned by Gopal Krishna Gokhale. 
  These stories of ordinary people will motivate you to live with passion, achieve your dreams, and most importantly, live your life with purpose.

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  A Society - From their pens to...

  Virginia Woolf

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  Adeline Virginia Woolf was born on the 25th January 1882 in South Kensington in London. 
  Although lauded as a founder of modernist writing with such classics as ‘Orlando’, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To the Lighthouse’ and, of course, many classic short stories, her background is filled with elements of tragedy that she somehow overcame to become such a revered writer.   Her mother died when she was 13, her half-sister Stella two years later and with it her first of several nervous breakdowns.  Appallingly it was later found that three of her half-brothers had sexually abused her so darkness must have seemed ever present.   
  She began writing professionally at age 20 but her father’s death two years later brought a complete mental collapse and she was briefly institutionalised.  Somehow she found within herself a literary career and with it great innovations in writing; she was a pioneer of “stream of consciousness”.    
  Her tight circle of friends were the founders of the Bloomsbury Group, a movement whose legacy still influences across the arts and society in many way to this day.   
  Whilst the dark periods continued to interrupt her emotional state her rate of work never ceased.  Until, on 28th March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled up its pockets with stones, and walked into the River Ouse, in Lewes, East Sussex and drowned herself.  Her body was not recovered until the 18th April.  She was 59. 
  She left behind a note which read in part “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again.  I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times.  And I shan't recover this time.  I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate.  So I am doing what seems the best thing to do”.

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