On the fiftieth anniversary of his death, C.S. Lewis was commemorated in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, taking his place beside the greatest names in English literature. Oxford and Cambridge Universities, where Lewis taught, also held celebrations of his life. This volume gathers together addresses from those events into a single anthology. Rowan Williams and Alister McGrath assess Lewis's legacy in theology, Malcolm Guite addresses his integration of reason and imagination, William Lane Craig takes a philosophical perspective, while Lewis's successor as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, Helen Cooper, considers him as a critic. Others contribute their more personal and creative responses: Walter Hooper, Lewis's biographer, recalls their first meeting; there are poems, essays, a panel discussion, and even a report by the famous 'Mystery Worshipper' from the Ship of Fools website, along with a moving recollection by Royal Wedding composer Paul Mealor about how he set one of Lewis's poems to music. Containing theology, literary criticism, poetry, memoir, and much else, this volume reflects the breadth of Lewis's interests and the astonishing variety of his own output: a diverse and colourful commemoration of an extraordinary man.

The incredible autobiography from Claire Lorrimer, bestselling romance novelist and daughter of 'Queen of Romance' Denise Robins. You Never Know is former WAAF officer and bestselling novelist Claire Lorrimer's autobiography, containing a graphic description of the six years she spent doing vitally secret work as a WAAF in the Fighter Command Filter Rooms in World War Two. It is the fascinating story of a life overflowing with adventure, humour, tragedy, love, joy and disasters. Claire paints vivid images of her childhood when her mother, the famous author Denise Robins, entertained pre-and post-war literati at her weekend country house parties. Armed with an old typewriter, a vivid imagination and a passion for life, Claire started writing books during the war. She has had a remarkable career and You Never Know is the intriguing story of a long and extraordinary life.

Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887) is a book by American investigative journalist Nellie Bly. For her first assignment for Joseph Pulitzer's famed New York World newspaper, Bly went undercover as a patient at a notorious insane asylum on Blackwell's Island. Spending ten days there, she recorded the abuses and neglect she witnessed, turning her research into a sensational two-part story for the New York World later published as Ten Days in a Mad-House. Checking into a New York boardinghouse under a false identity, Bly began acting in a disturbed, unsettling manner, prompting the police to be summoned. In a courtroom the next morning, she claimed to be suffering from amnesia, leading to her diagnosis as insane from several doctors. Sent to the Women's Lunatic Asylum, Bly spent ten days witnessing and experiencing rampant abuse and neglect. There, she noticed that many of the patients, who were constantly beaten and belittled by violent nurses and staff members, seemed perfectly sane or showed signs of having their conditions severely worsened during their time at the asylum. Served spoiled food, forced to live in squalor, and given ice-cold baths by unsympathetic attendants, the patients she met during her stay seemed as though abandoned by a city that had sent them there for the supposed purpose of healing. Showcasing her skill as a reporter and true pioneer of investigative journalism, Bly published her story to a captivated and inspired audience, setting in motion a process of reform that would change the city's approach to its asylums for the better. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Nellie Bly's Ten Days in a Mad-House is a classic work of American investigative journalism reimagined for modern readers.

While Henry David Thoreau's travels to the Maine Woods and Cape Cod were well documented and have been followed by "Thoreauvians" for decades, his 1861 "journey west" with Horace Mann, Jr.--which took the duo from Massachusetts to Minnesota and back--was left to be veiled in mystery. This book details this, the last, longest, and least-known of Thoreau's excursions. The story of two 19th-century men and the 21st-century woman who was determined to follow their 4,000-mile path, this account will intrigue history buffs as they follow in the footsteps of a popular American writer and naturalist.

A.E. Housman's poetry (especially A Shropshire Lad) remains well-known, widely read and often quoted. However, Housman did not view himself as a professional poet, always making quite clear that his proper job' was as a Professor of Latin. Housman's fame as a poet has often obscured the fact that he was the leading British classical scholar of his generation, and a Cambridge Professor. It has also sometimes been suggested that Housman's two areas of activity are the sign of a flawed or divided' personality. A.E. Housman: A Single Life argues that there is no fundamental tension between Housman the poet and Housman the scholar, and his career is presented very much as that of a working academic who also wrote poetry. The book gives a full account of what Housman described as the great and real troubles of my early manhood', and in particular his unrequited and life-long love for his undergraduate friend Moses Jackson. It resists the temptation to classify Housman too exclusively as a melancholic, and is sceptical about Housman's reputed rudeness and misanthropy, pointing out that, though Housman was famously aloof in manner, he was notably loyal and generous, courteous in his daily dealings and generally liked by those who knew him. He also possessed a highly developed sense of the absurd and a ready and often disconcerting wit, features which characterised not only his letters and miscellaneous writings, but also, famously, much of his scholarly work.

"Rewriting" in the context of critical work on Caribbean literature has tended to be used to discuss revisionism from a variety of postcolonial perspectives, such as "rewriting history" or "rewriting canonical texts." By shifting the focus to how Caribbean writers return to their own works in order to rework them, this book offers theoretical considerations to postcolonial studies on "literariness" in relation to the near-obsessive degree of rewriting to which Caribbean writers have subjected their own literary texts. Focusing specifically on Franketienne, this book offers an overview of how the defining aesthetic and thematic components of Franketienne's major works have emerged over the course of his forty-year writing career. It reveals the marked development of key notions guiding his literary creation since the 1960s, and demonstrates that rewriting illustrates the central aesthetic of the Spiral which has always shaped his oeuvre. It is, the book argues, the constantly moving form of the Spiral which Franketienne explores through his constant reworking of his previously written texts. Franketienne and Rewriting negotiates between the literary and material ends of the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies, arguing that literary characteristics in Franketienne connect with changing political, social, economic, and cultural circumstances in the Haiti he rewrites.

This is the first biography of a remarkable writer and incorrigible rebel. Evelyn Sharp's story encapsulates the shifts in opportunities for talented Victorian women who survived into the mid-twentieth century.

She was born into a privileged family in 1869 and became a very popular writer of schoolgirl fiction. Extremely versatile, she also produced fairy tales alongside stories for the infamous "Yellow Book." A Manchester Guardian journalist for over four decades, Evelyn Sharp became the first regular contributor to its iconic Women's Page. Before and during the First World War she was a leading suffragette, editing the newspaper, "Votes for Women."

This biography draws on Evelyn Sharp's publications, as well as letter and diaries vividly describing experiences such as famine relief in Soviet Russia and daily life in wartime Kensington for and elderly woman. It will be of interest to gender and social historians as well as to those interested in children's and women's literature.

The Jane Austen Treasury is a delightful collection of facts and insights into the life and times of the great novelist and the attitudes and customs that shaped both her and her work. Taking each of her novels in turn, and exploring both underlying themes and historical context, it reveals the complexities that underlie her simple and timeless romances. Featuring her views on love and marriage, women's rights and society's mores, this beautiful volume looks at the facts of Austen's life and times, as well as little known stories about her novels, including: the marriage proposal that Austen accepted, only to change her mind, the mock grown-up fiction she wrote as a child, her personal connections to the Napoleonic Wars, and how her love of puzzles and verbal games influenced her writings.

In his travel narrative Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), Robert Louis Stevenson declares, "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Taking up the concepts of time, place, and memory, the contributors to this collection explore in what ways the dynamic view of life suggested by this quotation permeates Stevenson's work. The essays adopt a wide variety of critical approaches, including post-colonial theory, post-structuralism, new historicism, art history, and philosophy, making use of the vast array of literary materials that Stevenson left across a global journey that began in Scotland in 1850 and ended in Samoa in 1894. These range from travel journals, letters, and classic literary staples such as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to rarely read masterpieces such as The Master of Ballantrae or The Ebb-Tide. While much recent scholarship on Stevenson foregrounds geography, the present volume also examines the theme of movement across memory, time, and generic boundaries. Taken together, the essays offer a view of Stevenson that demonstrates how the protean nature of his literary output reflects the radical developments in science, technology, and culture that characterized the age in which he lived.

Anna Janko's mother watched as her whole village was destroyed and her family murdered in 1943. She passes the trauma of the event onto her daughter, and A Little Annihilation bears witness to both the crime and its aftershocks - the trauma visited on the next generation - as revealed in a beautifully scripted and deeply personal mother-daughter dialogue. As Anna fathoms the full dimension of the tragedy, she reflects the memory and loss, the ethics of helplessness, and the lingering effects of war.

'I seem to have banged on this year rather more than usual. I make no apology for that, nor am I nervous that it will it make a jot of difference. I shall still be thought to be kindly, cosy and essentially harmless. I am in the pigeon-hole marked 'no threat' and did I stab Judi Dench with a pitchfork I should still be a teddy bear.' Alan Bennett's third collection of prose Keeping On Keeping On follows in the footsteps of the phenomenally successful Writing Home and Untold Stories, each published ten years apart. This latest collection contains Bennett's peerless diaries 2005 to 2015, reflecting on a decade that saw four premieres at the National Theatre (The Habit of Art, People, Hymn and Cocktail Sticks), a West End double-bill transfer, and the films of The History Boys and The Lady in the Van. There's a provocative sermon on private education given before the University at King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and 'Baffled at a Bookcase' offers a passionate defence of the public library. The book includes Denmark Hill, a darkly comic radio play set in suburban south London, as well as Bennett's reflections on a quarter of a century's collaboration with Nicholas Hytner. This is an engaging, humane, sharp, funny and unforgettable record of life according to the inimitable Alan Bennett.

In 1907, author, poet, essayist, and folk art historian Eliza Calvert Hall (1856--1935) published Aunt Jane of Kentucky, a collection of stories about rural life infused with the spirit and gentle good humor of its elderly narrator, Aunt Jane. The book and several sequels achieved wide popularity, reaching an estimated one million readers in her lifetime, and placed Hall in the front ranks of "local color" fiction writers of her time. Eliza Calvert Hall's life and work unfolded during a time of restlessness and change for American women. Born Eliza "Lida" Calvert in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Hall experienced the upheaval of both the Civil War and family scandal. Forced to help support her mother and four siblings by teaching school, she became a published poet, adopting her grandmother's name, Hall, as her pseudonym. At twenty-nine, she married William A. Obenchain, and in the space of eight years gave birth to four children. As Hall struggled to balance her writing career with the duties of a nineteenth-century wife and mother, suffragist Laura Clay was lobbying for every woman's right to vote. Hall joined the battle, writing fearlessly in support of suffrage and equality. While her passionate essays served as a direct appeal for this cause, her creative writing also carried a feminist spirit, celebrating the strength, humor, love, and art of the common woman. In Eliza Calvert Hal: Kentucky Author and Suffragistl, Lynn E. Niedermeier tells the story of this remarkable Kentuckian for the first time. Hall's challenge was to balance the artist's creative ambitions with the crusader's passion for achieving the goal of political equality for American women. Her successes did not stem from privilege or leisure; although she was an acclaimed writer, Hall was an ordinary woman, a wife and mother of moderate economic means. Through the power of her words, she challenged others to match her courage, independence, intellectual energy, and loyalty to her sex.

"I was one of the 8,000-strong 'Betjemaniacs' gathered at Carruan farm in Cornwall in August 2006 to celebrate the hundredth birthday of Sir John Betjeman, the late Poet Laureate. Situated high above Polzeath, with tremendous views out to the azure Atlantic and the great headland of Pentire, Carruan was, with its exhilarating sense of space, an inspirational choice for this great event. I stood in the pasty-queue with the Archbishop of Canterbury, watched the poetic performance of Bert Biscoe, and browsed among the bookstalls in the hope of finding second-hand copies of rare Betjeman books to add to my collection. Here was that Patrick Taylor-Martin volume that had eluded me for years, and Betjeman's Britain - compiled by Candida Lycett Green, Betjeman's daughter - together with more recent editions of old favourites." Philip Payton, in the preface to John Betjeman and Cornwall Quintessentially English, Betjeman was an 'outsider' in England - and doubly so in Cornwall where, as he was the first to admit, he was a 'foreigner'. And yet, as this book describes, Betjeman also strove to acquire a veneer of 'Cornishness', cultivating an alternative Celtic identity, and finding inspiration in Cornwall's Anglo-Catholic tradition. He was also active in Cornish affairs, insisting that Cornwall was not part of England, and championing Cornish environmental concerns that anticipated today's focus on sustainability. The new research in this book includes a wealth of previously ignored source material, forming a lively new account of Betjeman's life and work and his defining relationship with Cornwall. This book is likely to be controversial and to provoke debate.

Picking up her story in the late '60s at age 21, Cathy Gildiner whisks the reader through five years and three countries, beginning when she is a poetry student at Oxford. Her education extended beyond the classroom to London's swinging Carnaby Street, the mountains of Wales, and a posh country estate.
After Oxford, Cathy returns to Cleveland, Ohio, which was still reeling from the Hough Ghetto Riots. Not one to shy away from a challenge, she teaches at a high school where police escort teachers through the parking lot, trying to engage apathetic students and tussling with the education authorities.
In 1970, Cathy moves to Canada. While studying literature at the University of Toronto, she rooms with members of the FLQ (Quebec separatists) and then with one of the biggest drug dealers in Canada. Along the way, she falls in love with the man who eventually became her husband and embarks on a new career in psychology.
Coming Ashore brings readers back to a fascinating era populated by lively characters, but most memorable of all is the singular Cathy McClure.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - The biography of Geoffrey Chaucer is no longer a mixture of unsifted facts, and of more or less hazardous conjectures. Many and wide as are the gaps in our knowledge concerning the course of his outer life, and doubtful as many important passages of it remain - in vexatious contrast with the certainty of other relatively insignificant data - we have at least become aware of the foundations on which alone a trustworthy account of it can be built. These foundations consist partly of a meagre though gradually increasing array of external evidence, chiefly to be found in public documents, - in the Royal Wardrobe Book, the Issue Rolls of the Exchequer, the Customs Rolls, and suchlike records - partly of the conclusions which may be drawn with confidence from the internal evidence of the poet's own indisputably genuine works, together with a few references to him in the writings of his contemporaries or immediate successors. Which of his works are to be accepted as genuine, necessarily forms the subject of an antecedent enquiry, such as cannot with any degree of safety be conducted except on principles far from infallible with regard to all the instances to which they have been applied, but now accepted by the large majority of competent scholars. Thus, by a process which is in truth dulness and dryness itself except to patient endeavour stimulated by the enthusiasm of special literary research, a limited number of results has been safely established, and others have at all events been placed beyond reasonable doubt. Around a third series of conclusions or conjectures the tempest of contro-versy still rages; and even now it needs a wary step to pass without fruitless deviations through a maze of assumptions consecrated by their longevity, or commended to sympathy by the fervour of personal conviction.

In the foreword to Li-Young Lee's first book, "Rose" (BOA Editions, 1986), Gerald Stern wrote, "What characterizes Li-Young Lee's poetry is a certain kind of humility, a kind of cunning, a love of plain speech, a search for wisdom and understanding. . . . I think we are in the presence of a true spirit." Poetry lovers agree "Rose" has gone on to sell more than eighty thousand copies, and Li-Young Lee has become one of the country's most beloved poets.

"Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee" is a collection of the best dozen interviews given by Li-Young Lee over the past twenty years. From a twenty-nine-year-old poet prodigy to a seasoned veteran in high demand for readings and appearances across the United States and abroad, these interviews capture Li-Young Lee at various stages of his artistic development. He not only discusses his family's flight from political oppression in China and Indonesia, but how that journey affected his poetry and the engaging, often painful, insights being raised a cultural outsider in America afforded him. Other topics include spirituality (primarily Christianity and Buddhism) and a wide range of aesthetic topics such as literary influences, his own writing practices, the role of formal and informal education in becoming a writer, and his current life as a famous and highly sought-after American poet.

Johnson rose from obscure origins to become a major literary figure of the eighteenth century. Through a detailed survey of his major works and political journalism, Hudson constructs a complex picture of Johnson as a moralist forced to accept the realistic nature of politics during an era of revolutionary transition.

Furbank and Owens attempt to disentangle the story of Daniel Defoe's political career, as journalist, polemicist, political theorist and secret agent. They argue that this remarkable career calls for a good deal of rethinking, not least because biography and bibliography are here inextricably intertwined.

Most famous as the author of "Gulliver's Travels", Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was one of the most important propagandists and satirists of his day. This study seeks to contextualize Swift within the political arena of his day.

In the autumn of 1873, Wilkie Collins followed the example of fellow literary celebrities Dickens and Thackeray, and began a six-month reading tour of America. This book places this tour within the American lyceum movement of the later nineteenth century.

John Thelwall was a Romantic and Enlightenment polymath. In 1794 he was tried and acquitted of high treason, earning himself the disdainful soubriquet 'acquitted felon' from Secretary of State for War, William Windham. Later, Thelwall's interests turned to poetry and plays, and was a collaborator and confidant of Wordsworth and Coleridge.