What happens when we engage with fictional characters? How do our imaginative engagements bear on our actions in the wider world? Moving between the literary and the philosophical, Sophie Ratcliffe considers the ways in which readers feel when they read, and how they understand ideas of feeling. On Sympathy uses dramatic monologues based on The Tempest as its focus, and broaches questions about fictional belief, morality, and the dynamics between readers, writers, and fictional characters. The book challenges conventionally accepted ideas of literary identification and sympathy, and asks why the idea of sympathy has been seen as so important to liberal humanist theories of literary value. Individual chapters on Robert Browning, W. H. Auden, and Samuel Beckett, who all drew on Shakespeare's late play, offer new readings of some major works, while the book's epilogue tackles questions of contemporary sympathy. Ranging from the nineteenth century to the present day, this important new study sets out to clarify and challenge current assumptions about reading and sympathetic belief, shedding new light on the idea and ideal of sympathy, the workings of affect and allusion, and the ethics of reading.

Love affairs, grief, unhappiness, the mess at the bottom of your handbag. This is a book about the things we hide from other people, and how we might find new ways to think about love and intimacy in the twenty-first century. How do you learn to be a grown-up when you've never got over the death of a parent? What makes a 'happy family'? What happens if you can't stop thinking about an ex? And what does commitment really mean? In this genre-defying memoir, Sophie Ratcliffe travels through time, space and great literature to capture the complex and often messy nature of life, love - and grief. Beautifully crafted, painfully funny and frank about things that most people keep to themselves, The Lost Properties of Love is a game-changing exploration of the human heart.

P. G. Wodehouse wrote some of the greatest comic masterpieces of all time. So, naturally, we find the same humor and wit in his letters. He offers hilarious accounts of living in England and France, the effects of prohibition, and how to deal with publishers. He even recounts cricket matches played while in a Nazi internment camp (Wodehouse wanted to show the stiff upper lip of the British in the toughest situations). Over the years, Wodehouse corresponded with relatives, friends, and some of the greatest figures of the twentieth century: Agatha Christie, Ira Gershwin, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The letters are arranged chronologically with intersecting sections of biography written by Sophie Ratcliffe. This is the only book you will need to understand the man behind the characters.