This selection of J M Barrie's work covers three different genres and all the most telling themes found in his writing: Scotland, childhood, fantasy and sentimentality, sexual anxiety, theatrical invention, social comedy and proto-feminism. The disturbing prose fable of The Little White Bird contains the first and most original exploration of the Peter Pan theme, properly set in the wider context of a middle-aged man's engageme ...
This extraordinary work is at one and the same time an account of a personal spiritual crisis and a hilarious spoof on academic learning, early Victorian values and materialism. In Sartor Resartus (‘the tailor retailored’) a fictitious editor retells the theories of an equally fictitious German professor who has come to the conclusion that human institutions and morals are only clothes to shield us from nothingness, clothes that can be changed a ...
'Introducing this release of The Awakening has given me an opportunity to re-experience one of my life's important books . . . I still marvel at Chopin's realism, her impatience with conventional trappings, her arresting honesty' BARBARA KINGSOLVER 'Incisive, brilliant and haunting' MAGGIE O'FARRELL Over one long, languid summer Edna Pontellier, fettered by marriage and motherhood, becomes acqua ...
Haunted by a sense that the living and the dead are separated by no more than a narrow and disputed borderland, the tales that Margaret Oliphant liked to call her 'stories of the seen and the unseen' are now recognised as among the most remarkable explorations of the supernatural to appear in Victorian times. A prolific writer with many novels to her name, Margaret Oliphant could produce her few supernatural tales 'only wh ...
