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  The Hired Baby A Romance of the...

  Mary Mackay

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  Mary Mackay was born on the 1st May 1855 in London. 
   
  At the age of 11 she was sent to a Parisian convent to further her education and returned to Britain four years later in 1870. 
   
  She began her career as a musician, giving piano recitals under the pseudonym of ‘Marie Corelli’ which she now also used as she turned to life as a writer. She published her first novel in 1866. From that point until World War I her popularity and sales exceeded those of Arthur Conan Doyle, H G Wells, and Rudyard Kipling, although she also faced criticism from the literary elite for her melodramatic writing. She was also fairly prolific; in total she wrote some 30 novels and short story collections. 
   
  A recurring theme in Corelli's books is her attempt to reconcile Christianity with reincarnation, astral projection as well as other mystical ideas that she was drawn too. She was also closely associated with the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis; a Rosicrucian and mystical organisation.  
   
  Corelli spent her final years in Stratford-upon-Avon and fought hard to preserve its 17th-century buildings. She was also somewhat eccentric boating on the Avon in a gondola, complete with gondolier, whom she had brought over from Venice. 
   
  For over forty years, Corelli lived with her devoted companion, Bertha Vyver. 
   
  During World War I she was convicted of food hoarding which shocked her paying public.  From that point she wrote little and sold little. 
   
  Marie Corelli died in Stratford on the 21st April 1924.  Later her beloved Bertha was buried alongside her.

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  Sodom and Gomorrah – Part II

  Marcel Proust

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  In Sodom and Gomorrah, Part II, Marcel continues his voyage of discovery through the homosexual world, where the affairs of the ageing Baron de Charlus lead to unexpected and hilarious adventures. But the discovery of a secret in the past of his mistress, Albertine, fills Marcel with fear and forces him to change his plans. Sodom and Gomorrah – Cities of the Plain addresses the subject of homosexual love with insight and understanding.

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  Gambler's Luck

  E. T. A. Hoffmann

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  E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror as well as a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. His stories were highly influential during the 19th century, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement. 
  'Gambler's Luck' tells the story of a young German baron who is enjoying a streak of beginner's luck at the gambling tables. As his winnings mount up, the young man is gradually becoming sucked into the addictive habit of gambling. One night a stranger appears at the gambling table and watches the baron intently. The stranger appears night after night, until the baron is infuriated and challenges the man. A later chance meeting between the two results in the stranger relating a most unusual and gripping tale....

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  The Four Fists

  F Scott itzgerald

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  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
   
  His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
   
  In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
   
  He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
   
  Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
   
  The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack. 
   
  Amongst his many short story gems is ‘The Four Fists’. It follows a life, from boyhood to maturity, and how an occasional brush with physical force influences and changes that life.

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  The Prussian Officer

  D. H. Lawrence

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  Because of his frank and honest portrayal of human sexuality in the controversial works for which he is best known, e.g. "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and "Women in Love", D. H. Lawrence was not widely respected in his day. In fact at the time of his death he was considered little more than a pornographer. However E. M. Forester challenged this portrayal calling Lawrence "The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation", and with his extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization, Lawrence has ultimately secured his position as one of the greatest writers in the English language. "The Prussian Officer and Other Stories" is a collection of his short stories first published in 1914 which exhibit this great literary talent. The stories of this volume include the following tales: The Prussian Officer, The Thorn in the Flesh, Daughters of the Vicar, A Fragment of Stained Glass, The Shades of Spring, Second Best, The Shadow in the Rose Garden, Goose Fair, The White Stocking, A Sick Collier, The Christening, and Odour of Chrysanthemums.

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  The Portrait of a Lady

  Henry James

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  The American lady in the title of this masterpiece, Isabel Archer; beautiful, young and spirited, visits her wealthy relatives in England, rejects marriage proposals by two more or less worthy suitors, inherits a fortune and then is manipulated into marriage to one of the most cruel creatures imaginable: Gilbert Osmond...This is just scratching the surface of this colossal, monumental work; so rich in both its prose, its characters and its many, many themes. A few of the major ones being love, death, personal responsibility, personal identity, freedom, ethics or (lack thereof) and the New world versus the Old world. This work (its story takes place mostly in England and Italy) finds new admirers from generation to generation...

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