Author: May Sarton
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497685486
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
May Sarton’s powerful and profound novel of an extraordinary life, and of one woman’s efforts to preserve the force and vitality of her experiences on the pages of a book For the second time in my life—and I am now seventy—I am embarking on an effort which may well come to nothing but which has possessed my mind, haunts, and will not let me sleep. From her opening statement, Cam, the narrator of The Magnificent Spinster, declares her grand intentions: to write a novel—a worthy and important one in celebration of her recently deceased friend and teacher, Jane Reid, whose dearth of family threatens the memory of her almost tangible greatness. And so she writes, re-creating Jane’s childhood, adolescence, and years as a teacher—including the one in which Cam was her student. She writes of Jane’s irrepressible spirit and the charming letters Jane penned about her adventures, and she recounts Jane’s growing isolation as she aged, which, rather than softening her, only made her shine brighter. Raw, warm, and beautifully rendered, The Magnificent Spinster is a stunning achievement—part memoir, part epistolary recollection, and part novel within a novel about friendship, memory, and the power of a brilliant soul.
Author: May Sarton
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393305609
Category : Friendship
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
The “magnificent spinster” is Jane Reid, a teacher who became not only a revered role model but a dear friend to Cam, the narrator of this novel within a novel. After Jane’s death, the accidental discovery of poems written by Cam in her youth to Jane prompts a flood of recollections—and frees Cam to imagine in fiction Jane’s passionately vibrant life.
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786747765
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
From one of the world's most passionately engaged and acclaimed literary citizens comes Writing with Intent, the largest collection to date of Margaret Atwood's nonfiction, ranging from 1983 to 2005. Composed of autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book reviews, and introductory pieces to great works of literature, this is the award-winning author's first book-length nonfiction publication in twenty years. Arranged chronologically, these writings display the development of Atwood's worldview as the world around her changes. Included are the Booker Prize -- winning author's reviews of books by John Updike, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as essays in which she remembers herself reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse at age nineteen, and discusses the influence of George Orwell's 1984 on the writing of The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's New York Times Book Review piece that helped make Orhan Pamuk's Snow a bestseller can be found here, as well as a look back on a family trip to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion, and her "Letter to America," written after September 11, 2001. The insightful and memorable pieces in this book serve as a testament to Atwood's career, reminding readers why she is one of the most esteemed writers of our time.
Author: Valerie Miner
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497610605
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
An indispensable collection of essays reflecting on the historical and cultural relevance of feminist movements across the globe In these remarkably far-reaching writings, author and journalist Valerie Miner delivers a complex and engaging volume of essential reading. This book touches on topics ranging from suburban housewives to lesbian identity to feminist thought. Miner provides an important perspective on the interrelated concepts of authorship, gender identity, and social criticism. Included are examinations of the works of Grace Paley, Margaret Atwood, and May Sarton, meditations on writing, and reflections on the cultural legacy of feminism. Miner’s insights are both perspicacious and thought provoking. Written with profound passion and knowledge, these tracts are of tremendous value to all readers engaged with the politics of equality.
Author: May Sarton
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497685443
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Winner of the American Book Award: May Sarton’s honest and engrossing journal of her seventieth year, spent living and working on the Maine coast. May Sarton’s journals are a captivating look at a rich artistic life. In this, her ode to aging, she savors the daily pleasures of tending to her garden, caring for her dogs, and entertaining guests at her beloved Maine home by the sea. Her reminiscences are raw, and her observations are infused with the poetic candor for which Sarton—over the course of her decades-long career—became known. An enlightening glimpse into a time—the early 1980s—and an age, At Seventy is at once specific and universal, providing a unique window into septuagenarian life that readers of all generations will enjoy. At times mournful and at others hopeful, this is a beautiful memoir of the year in which Sarton, looking back on it all, could proclaim, “I am more myself than I have ever been.”
Author: Margot Peters
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307788539
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
The first biography of May Sarton: a brilliant revelation of the life and work of a literary figure who influenced her thousands of readers not only by her novels and poetry, but by her life and her writings about it. May Sarton's career stretched from 1930 (early sonnets published in Poetry magazine) to 1995 (her journal At Eighty-Two). She wrote more than twenty novels, and twenty-five books of poems and journals. The acclaimed biographer Margot Peters was given full access to Sarton's letters, journals, and notes, and during five years of research came to know Sarton herself--the complex woman and artist. She gives us a compelling portrait of Sarton the actress, the poet, the novelist, the feminist, the writer who struggled for literary acceptance. She shows us, beneath Sarton's exhilarating, irresistible spirit, the needy courtier and seducer, the woman whose creativity was propelled by the psychic drama she created in others. We watch young May at age two as she is abruptly uprooted from her native Belgium by World War I, a child ignored both by her mother, who was intent on her own artistic vision and reluctant to cope with a child, and by her father, obsessed with his academic research. We see Sarton as a young girl in America, and then later, at nineteen, choosing a life in the theatre, landing a job in Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory, and gathering what would become a tight-knit coterie of friends and lovers . . . Sarton beginning to write poetry and novels . . . Sarton making friends with Elizabeth Bowen and Julian Huxley, Erika and Klaus Mann, Virginia Woolf, the poet H.D.--charming and enlisting them with her work, her vitality, her hunger for love, driven by her need to conquer (among her conquests: Bowen, Huxley, and later his wife, Juliette). We see her intense friendships with literary pals, including Muriel Rukeyser (her lover), and Louise Bogan, Sarton's "literary sibling, who at once encouraged her and excluded her from a world in which Bogan was a central figure. We see Sarton begin to create in the spiritual journals that inspired the devotion of readers the image of a strong, independent woman who lived peacefully with solitude--an image that contradicted the reality of her neediness, loneliness, and isolation as she pushed away loved ones with her demands and betrayals. A fascinating portrait of one of our major literary figures--a book that for the first time reveals the life that she herself kept hidden.
Author: Rhonda Woodward
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101573716
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
From Rhonda Woodward, a writer with “sparkle and heart,” comes a beloved Signet Regency Romance—available digitally for the first time. Luck has always eluded Celia Langston. When her parents passed away ten years ago, she had to make her own way in the world, forsaking a come-out Season in London—and any chance at marriage. But Celia, now a governess, has never been one for self-pity. Rather, at the age of six-and-twenty, she has accepted the lot Fate has dealt her—that of a spinster…With his handsome face, reputation for bravery in the war, and princely fortune, the Duke of Severly has never suffered for want of female companionship. The crème de la crème hang on his every word. So when he takes notice of his nephews’ governess—for even the plainest of gray dresses cannot conceal her regal poise and delicious curves—Severly surprises even himself. For one, he has never admired a woman below his station, let alone a governess. For another, Celia seems to hold a grudge against him. But her rejection of him only fans the flames of his desire, and Severly knows he’s in for a long and difficult chase…“Rhonda Woodward shows a definite flair for the Regency period.”—The Romance Reader“A talented writer.”—Rakehell“[Rhonda Woodward has] historically accurate writing that shines.”—All About Romance
Author: Gale, Cengage Learning
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
ISBN: 1410359034
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 26
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Book Description
A Study Guide for Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's Tale," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
Author: Barbara Pym
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101666250
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Excellent Women is probably the most famous of Barbara Pym's novels. The acclaim a few years ago for this early comic novel, which was hailed by Lord David Cecil as one of 'the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years,' helped launch the rediscovery of the author's entire work. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a spinster in the England of the 1950s, one of those 'excellent women' who tend to get involved in other people's lives - such as those of her new neighbor, Rockingham, and the vicar next door. This is Barbara Pym's world at its funniest.
Author: Helen Rippier Wheeler
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9781555876616
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Guide with more than two thousand bibliographic entries and cross-references. It includes journal articles, book chapters, essays, and doctoral dissertations, as well as complete books.
