"The Fairy Nightcaps" from Frances Elizabeth Barrow an American author. Extract: In the deep shadow of the Highlands, at the foot of the old Crow Nest Mountain, is a wild and beautiful hollow, closed around on every side by tall trees, interlaced together by the clasping tendrils of the honeysuckle, and the giant arms of luxuriant wild grape-vines. The mossy edge of this magic circle is thickly embroidered with violets, harebells, perfumed clover-blossoms, and delicate, feathery ferns. A little brook, overhung with grasses and whispering leaves, dances and dimples in the bright sunlight and...

The Fifth Queen trilogy is a series of connected historical novels by English novelist Ford Madox Ford. It consists of three novels, The Fifth Queen; And How She Came to Court (1906), Privy Seal (1907) and The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908), which present a highly fictionalised account of Katharine Howard's arrival at the Court of Henry VIII, her eventual marriage to the king, and her death. The Fifth Queen trilogy has an omniscient narrator. Katharine Howard is introduced in the first book as a devout Roman Catholic, impoverished, young noblewoman escorted by her fiery cousin Thomas Culpeper. By...

Summer is a novel by Edith Wharton published in 1917 by Charles Scribner's Sons. The story is one of only two novels to be set in New England by Wharton, who was best known for her portrayals of upper-class New York society. The novel details the sexual awakening of its protagonist, Charity Royall, and her cruel treatment by the father of her child, and shares many plot similarities with Wharton's better-known novel, Ethan Frome. Only moderately well received when originally published, Summer has had a resurgence in critical popularity since the 1960s. Eighteen-year-old Charity Royall is...

"Bunner Sisters," like "The Age of Innocence" is set in 1870s New York, however the lives of Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner reflect impoverished New York. The sisters run a "very small shop, in a shabby basement, in a side street already doomed to decline." Shabby as it is, the sisters are happy in their small orderly community of supportive women. The story tells of the destruction of this life, and how the once content sisters are thrown into the realistic world outside of their little shop. Bunner Sisters was written in 1891, but wasn't published until 1916 in Edith Wharton's collection of...

The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton's twelfth novel, initially serialized in four parts in the Pictorial Review magazine in 1920, and later released by D. Appleton and Company as a book in New York and in London. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. The story is set in upper-class New York City in the 1870s, during the so-called Gilded Age. The Age of Innocence centers on an upper-class couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of the bride's cousin, plagued by scandal, whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel...

Preface: A nice phrase: "A People's Theatre." But what about it? There's no such thing in existence as a People's Theatre: or even on the way to existence, as far as we can tell. The name is chosen, the baby isn't even begotten: nay, the would-be parents aren't married, nor yet courting. A People's Theatre. Note the indefinite article. It isn't The People's Theatre, but A People's Theatre. Not the theatre of Plebs, the proletariat, but the theatre of A People. What people? Quel peuple donc?--A People's Theatre. Translate it into French for yourself. A People's Theatre. Since we can't produce...

Edgar Alfred Jepson was an English author. He created primarily mainstream adventure and detective fiction. He also wrote supernatural and fantasy stories. As an author, Jepson used a pseudonym, R. Edison Page, for some of his short stories. In other works he collaborated with such authors as John Gawsworth, Arthur Machen and Hugh Clevely. Jepson was also a translator, notably of the Arsene Lupin stories of Maurice Leblanc. He was a member of the Square Club of established Edwardian authors, and one of the more senior members of the New Bohemians drinking club. Jepson edited Vanity Fair...

The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, a short novel by Charles Dickens, was written and published in 1844, one year after A Christmas Carol and one year before The Cricket on the Hearth. It is the second in his series of "Christmas books": five short books with strong social and moral messages that he published during the 1840s. One New Year's Eve, Trotty, a poor elderly "ticket-porter" or casual messenger, is filled with gloom at the reports of crime and immorality in the newspapers, and wonders whether the working classes are simply wicked by...

The Battle of Life is a Love Story is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in 1846. It is the fourth of his five "Christmas Books," coming after The Cricket on the Hearth and followed by The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain. The setting is an English village that stands on the site of an historic battle. Some characters refer to the battle as a metaphor for the struggles of life, hence the title. Battle is the only one of the five Christmas Books that has no supernatural or explicitly religious elements. (One scene takes place at Christmas time, but it is not the final scene.) The...

A Tale of Two Cities is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same period. It follows the lives of several characters through these events. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, deals with the major...