|
Showing 1 - 5 of
5 matches in All Departments
|
The Hidden Hand (Paperback)
Joanne Dobson, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
|
R1,245
Discovery Miles 12 450
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
E.D.E.N. Southworth was one of the most popular and prolific
writers of the nineteenth century and her Capitola Black, or Black
Cap - a cross-dressing, adventure-seeking girl-woman - was so
well-loved that the book was serialized three times between 1859
and 1888 and was dramatized in forty different versions. When we
first meet sharp and witty Capitola she is living among beggars and
street urchins, and dressed as a boy because a boy can get work and
be safe, whereas a girl is left to starve for want of "proper"
employment. Unknown to her, Capitola has a very rich elderly
guardian who finds her at a providential moment and takes her back
to his palatial mansion where she finds herself "decomposing above
ground for want of having my blood stirred." But not to fear. There
are bandits, true-loves, evil men, long-lost mothers, and sweet
women friends in Capitola's future - not to mention thunder storms,
kidnap attempts, and duels. The pace is fast, the action
wonderfully unbelievable. This is escape literature at its
nineteenth-century best, with a woman at its center who makes you
feel strong, daring, and reckless
A nineteenth-century American missionary widow embarks on a daring
quest to find her dark-skinned child. India, 1857: Anna Wheeler
Roundtree, missionary wife, flees her husband's pious tyranny,
leaving the safety of the Protestant Mission in which she's spent
most of the past decade. Her timing is bad: the train carrying her
to freedom steams into the midst of the brutal Indian Rebellion.
She is, however, plucked from danger by Ashok Montgomery, a wealthy
Anglo-Indian tea planter. Together they escape the angry mobs and
find the shelter of an isolated mountain cave. There, for the first
time, Anna learns the true nature of love. New York City, 1860: Now
a successful poet featured in national magazines, Anna Wheeler is
astonished to learn that the daughter she bore upon her return was
not stillborn, as she was told, but has been kidnapped. When Anna
hears the baby described as "dark-skinned," she realizes that
Ashok, the man she'd left behind in the tumult of the rebellion, is
the true father, not her blond, fair-skinned husband. In her own
racially inflamed nation on the verge of its own war, Anna throws
respectability to the wind, learns to take risks, break rules, and
trust strangers in a determined search for the little girl. Then a
deranged voice arises from her tormented past, making demands that
compel her back to India. Anna must confront the evil that set her
running in the first place. Will her daring quest for her child,
and for the love of her life, end in triumph or in heartbreak?
Rejecting the view that interprets Emily Dickinson exclusively
as a proto-modernist poet, Joanne Dobson finds Dickinson rooted in
the expressive assumptions of her contemporary women writers. By
looking at Dickinson in the context of these writers, Dobson
uncovers the effects of common grounding in a cultural ethos of
femininity that mandated personal reticence. Combining literary
history and contemporary feminist literary theory, this study
posits a complex interaction of personal preferences and editorial
policies that resulted in a community of expression with impact on
women's writing and literary careers.
Professor Karen Pelletier is up for tenure in the English
Department. But when her one rival for the spota professor whose
ethnicity gives him minority-preference statusis found dead, Karen
in first on the list of suspects.
|
|