"George Eliot's beloved masterpiece in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with a foreword by Rebecca Mead, author of the bestselling memoir My Life in Middlemarch A triumph of realist fiction, George Eliot's Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of sweeping change. The proposed Reform Bill, the new railroads, and scientific advances are threatening upheaval on every front. Against...

Cultural critic Roiphe delves deeply into one of the most layered of subjects: marriage. Drawn in part from the private memoirs, personal correspondence, and long-forgotten journals of the British literary community from 1910 to the Second World War, here are seven "marriages à la mode"--each rising to the challenge of intimate relations in more or less creative ways: H.G. and Jane Wells; Katherine Mansfield; Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin;...

Includes more than 350 interpretative essays on the themes, plots, and techniques of works of twentieth-century fiction published in England, Ireland, Canada, India, Nigeria, and other areas of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

"From Napoléon Bonaparte and Frida Kahlo to Nelson Mandela and Ayn Rand glimpse the ardors of artists, painters, writers, and more in this touching volume of beautiful missives, from the author of the bestselling Letters of Note collections Beethoven yearns to see his famously unknown Immortal Beloved. A Victorian farmer proposes marriage to a woman he's never met. Zora Neale Hurston gives her ex-husband relationship advice. Mildred Loving asks the...

This collection of BBC interviews, documentaries, and films offers insights into the work and worlds of some of the greatest minds of the 20th century. The collection includes the only surviving voice recording of Virginia Woolf, J.R.R. Tolkien reading in his invented Elvish language, footage of Stanley Milgram's participants in his experiments in the human capacity for cruelty and Jane Goodall discovering a behavioral link between humans and chimpanzees....