Two Years in the Forbidden City

Merry Christmas, everyone! "Bah!" said Scrooge. "Humbug!" With those famous words unfolds a tale that renews the joy and caring that are Christmas. Whether we read it aloud with our family and friends or open the pages on a chill winter evening to savor the story in solitude, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a very special holiday experience. It is the one book that every year will warm our hearts with favorite memories of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future — and will remind us with laughter and tears that the true Christmas spirit comes from giving with love.With a heartwarming account of Dickens’s first reading of the Carol, and a biographical sketch.

Lady Susan is a short epistolary novel by Jane Austen, possibly written in 1794 but not published until 1871.

This epistolary novel, an early complete work that the author never submitted for publication, describes the schemes of the main character—the widowed Lady Susan—as she seeks a new husband for herself, and one for her daughter. Although the theme, together with the focus on character study and moral issues, is close to Austen's published work (Sense and Sensibility was also originally written in the epistolary form), its outlook is very different, and the heroine has few parallels in 19th-century literature. Lady Susan is a selfish, attractive woman, who tries to trap the best possible husband while maintaining a relationship with a married man. She subverts all the standards of the romantic novel: she has an active role, she's not only beautiful but intelligent and witty, and her suitors are significantly younger than she is (in contrast with Sense and Sensibility and Emma, which feature marriages of men who are sixteen years older than their wives). Although the ending includes a traditional reward for morality, Lady Susan herself is treated much more mildly than the adulteress in Mansfield Park, who is severely punished.

Main characters Lady Susan Vernon The main character, at around 30 to 40 years old, she is a widow of just a few months, who is known to flagrantly manipulate and seduce single and married men alike. She uses flirtation and seduction to gain her way through life. As a widow and a mother, her main goals are to quickly marry off her daughter Frederica (whom she despises and regards as stupid and stubborn) to a rich enough man, and to marry an even better match herself. Mrs. Vernon describes her as "...really excessively pretty. I have seldom seen so lovely a woman as Lady Susan. She is delicately fair, with fine grey eyes and dark eyelashes; and from her appearance one would not suppose her more than five and twenty, though she must in fact be ten years older. I was certainly not disposed to admire her...but I cannot help feeling that she possesses an uncommon union of symmetry, brilliancy and grace." Lady Susan is extremely cold towards her daughter, for whom she feels little or no affection: she calls her "a stupid girl, and has nothing to recommend her." It is possible that Jane Austen drew on the character of the mother of her neighbour, a beautiful Mrs. Craven, who had actually treated her daughters quite cruelly, locking them up, beating and starving them, till they ran away from home or married beneath their class to escape  There is an ironic contrast between the beautiful but determinedly chaste Susannah of the Old Testament and Lady Susan. Frederica Vernon Daughter of Lady Susan, Frederica is intended to a man who in the end marries Lady Susan. Oppressed by her mother, she is very shy and we don't initially perceive that she is a sweet, sensible girl. She is not as beautiful as her mother, but has a mild, delicate prettiness which, together with her evident ability to feel gratitude, attracts the Vernons. Frederica develops a love interest in Reginald De Courcy, and it is implied at the end that she will marry him. Catherine Vernon Sister-in-law to Lady Susan, Mrs. Vernon clearly sees through Lady Susan’s charade and tries her hardest to save Frederica from an unwanted match, and is vexed to see her brother Reginald becoming blinder and blinder to Lady Susan's faults. Lady Susan, who tried her utmost to prevent the marriage of Mrs. Vernon and Mr. Vernon, easily perceives how much Mrs. Vernon dislikes her, but allows that she is "well bred," and has an air of "a woman of fashion." She feels far more affection and concern for Frederica than Lady Susan does, and often laments Lady Susan's great neglect of her daughter. Charles Vernon Brother-in-law to Lady Susan, he allows her to stay at his home. Reginald De Courcy Brother of Mrs. Vernon. Reginald is to be Lady Susan’s newest conquest; he temporarily realizes her true intentions when Frederica confronts him with a letter, but his sense is again soothed to sleep by charming Lady Susan; and it is only until he finds direct proof of her glaring lack of principles that he opens his eyes to her real character. He is handsome, kind, warm, and open, but rather gullible. Mrs. Vernon writes in one of her letters, "Oh! Reginald, how is your judgement enslaved!" Lady De Courcy Confidante and mother of Mrs. Vernon. Lady De Courcy trusts her daughter's judgement and is concerned that Reginald not be taken in by Lady Susan. Alicia Johnson The intimate friend to whom Lady Susan confides all her true scheming. Mrs. Johnson has an immoral mindset similar to her friend's. Stuck in a marriage with a sensible man whom she does not love, and on whom Lady Susan derisively heaps the epithet of being "just old enough to be formal, ungovernable and to have the gout - too old to be agreeable, and too young to die", her chief delights are in hearing of and making suggestions for Lady Susan's manipulative plans.

1 work of William Wake
Priest in the Church of England (1657-1737)

This ebook presents a collection of 1 work of William Wake. A dynamic table of contents allows you to jump directly to the work selected.

Table of Contents:
- The suppressed Gospels and Epistles of the original New Testament of Jesus the Christ, Complete

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled, La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Pérez Galdós, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics.-wikipedia

Looking for a quick but engrossing read? In "Hunted Down," master storyteller Charles Dickens makes an uncharacteristic foray into quasi-detective fiction, and creating an idiosyncratic protagonist whose strange interests and preoccupations make him a natural when it comes to tracking down criminals.

Written in epistolary form, like her later unpublished novella, Lady Susan, Love and Freindship is thought to be one of the tales she wrote for the amusement of her family. The installments, written as letters from the heroine Laura, to Marianne, the daughter of her friend, Isabel, "La Comtesse de Feuillide", may have come about as nightly readings by the young Jane in the Austen home. Love and Freindship (the misspelling is one of many in the story) is clearly a parody of romantic novels Austen read as a child. This is clear even from the subtitle, "Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love", which completely undercuts the title. In form, it resembles a fairy tale as much as anything else, featuring wild coincidences and turns of fortune, but Austen is determined to lampoon the conventions of romantic stories, right down to the utter failure of romantic fainting spells, which always turn out badly for the female characters.

Finally available, a high quality book of the original classic edition.

This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work, which is now, at last, again available to you.

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They were no sooner gone but they began to launch out into the praises of Mademoiselle de Chartres, without bounds; they were sensible at length that they had run into excess in her commendation, and so both gave over for that time; but they were obliged the next day to renew the subject, for this new-risen beauty long continued to supply discourse to the whole Court; the Queen herself was lavish in her praise, and showed her particular marks of favour; the Queen-Dauphin made her one of her favourites, and begged her mother to bring her often to her Court; the Princesses, the Kings daughters, made her a party in all their diversions; in short, she had the love and admiration of the whole Court, except that of the Duchess of Valentinois: not that this young beauty gave her umbrage; long experience convinced her she had nothing to fear on the part of the King, and she had to great a hatred for the Viscount of Chartres, whom she had endeavoured to bring into her interest by marrying him with one of her daughters, and who had joined himself to the Queens party, that she could not have the least favourable thought of a person who bore his name, and was a great object of his friendship.

...Madam de Valentinois being jealous of a lady whom he had formerly loved, and whose wit and beauty were capable of lessening her interest, joined herself to the Constable, who was no more desirous than herself that the King should marry a sister of the Duke of Guise; they possessed the deceased King with their sentiments; and though he mortally hated the Duchess of Valentinois, and loved the Queen, he joined his endeavours with theirs to prevent the divorce; but in order to take from the King all thoughts of marrying the Queen my mother, they struck up a marriage between her and the King of Scotland, who had had for his first wife the Kings sister, and they did this because it was the easiest to be brought to a conclusion, though they failed in their engagements to the King of England, who was very desirous of marrying her; and that failure wanted but little of occasioning a rupture between the two Crowns: for Henry the Eighth was inconsolable, when he found himself disappointed in his expectations of marrying my mother; and whatever other Princess of France was proposed to him, he always said, nothing could make him amends for her he had been deprived of.

Full of energy and short of funds, old chums Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley decide to form the "Young Adventurers," and advertise themselves as willing to "go anywhere and do anything." Asked by a British Intelligence official to find a woman named Jane Finn, who disappeared with sensitive government documents, they soon find that their whimsical idea has drawn them into a complicated web of intrigue, intelligence agents, dubious identities, missing government papers, false clues - and all-too-real danger.

Mansfield park -  (FREE Audiobook Links!)

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Mansfield Park is a novel by Jane Austen, written at Chawton Cottage between February 1811 and 1813. It was published in May 1814 by Thomas Egerton, who published Jane Austen's two earlier novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. When the novel reached a second edition in 1816, its publication was taken over by John Murray, who also published its successor, Emma.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, née Stevenson (29 September 1810 – 12 November 1865), often referred to simply as Mrs Gaskell, was a British novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and as such are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature.
-wikipedia