At age 19 Anne Brontë left home and worked as a governess for a few years before becoming a writer. Agnes Grey was an 1847 novel based on her experience as a governess. Bronte depicts the precarious position of a governess and how that can affect a young woman. Agnes was the daughter of a minister whose family was in financial difficulty. She has only a few choices for employment. Agnes experience…
Emily Brontë's only novel is famous the world over and is the favorite classic of many readers. It is easy to see why, with hardship, insanity, cruelty, frustrated love, and ghosts.
"The American Claimant" is a comedy of mistaken identities and multiple role switches―fertile and familiar Mark Twain territory. Its cast of characters include an American enamored of British hereditary aristocracy and a British earl entranced by American democracy.Twain uses this over-the-top comic frame to explore some serious issues as well-such as the construction of self and identity, the rol…
"Eureka" (1848) is a lengthy non-fiction work by American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) which he subtitled «A Prose Poem», though it has also been subtitled as «An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe». Adapted from a lecture he had presented, Eureka describes Poe's intuitive conception of the nature of the universe with no antecedent scientific work done to reach his conclusions. He …
One of the most renowned public speakers of his day, Mark Twain was often asked to give speeches to mark public holidays or important anniversaries, for school graduations, at banquets for distinguished visitors, and at events sponsored by charitable organizations, reform groups, and the like. Published a few months after his death, this wide-ranging collection of speeches, spanning more than four…
A real storyteller can make a great story out of anything, even the most trivial occurrence. The candid, ironic, playful, and petulant sketches are indispensable to our understanding of a harried genius during thirteen quite amazing years.
The letters of Mark Twain are peculiarly of the revealing sort. He was a man of few restraints and of no affectations. In his correspondence, as in his talk, he spoke what was in his mind, untrammeled by literary conventions.
Bringing together 38 tales and sketches, «The 30 000 Dollar Bequest and Other Stories» provides a rare long view of Twain's work, covering virtually his entire career, from «Advice to Young Girls» (a spoof that appeared in 1865, just months before he achieved national acclaim for his «Jumping Frog» tale), to the title story, written in 1904.
Mark Twain began writing his autobiography long before the 1906 publications of "Chapters from my Autobiography". He originally planned to have his memoirs published only after his death but realized, once he’d passed his 70th year, that a lot of the material might be OK to publish before his departure. While much of the material consists of stories about the people, places and incidents of his lo…
«Солнце на восходе гонит ночь-смуглянку, А к закату месяц клонится унылый. Роза, солнце видя, встала на приманку, Под росой фиалка гнет свой стебель хилый…»