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Ella Cheever Thayer used her experience of being a telegraph operator at the Brunswick Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, to write Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes. The story begins when Nathalie Rogers receives a call from another telegrapher, “C,” who manages to make her laugh. Little did they know, this was the beginning of an unusual romance (for the time period) between two people who don’t know anything about each other—not even what they look like. Wired Love was a bestseller for 10 years after it was published.
Description
The Way of All Flesh is often considered to be Samuel Butler’s masterpiece, and is frequently included in many lists of best English-language novels of the 20th century. Despite this acclaim, Butler never published it in his lifetime—perhaps because the novel, a scathing, funny, and poignant satire of Victorian life, would have hit his contemporaries too close to home.
The novel traces four generations of the Pontifex family, though the central character is Ernest Pontifex, the third-generation wayward son. The reader follows Ernest through the eyes of his watchful godfather, Mr. Overton, as he strikes out from home to find his way in life. His struggles along the way illustrate the complex relationships between a son and his family, and especially his father; all while satirizing Victorian ideas about family, church, marriage, and schooling.
Description
Poul Anderson’s prolific writing career began in 1947, while still an undergraduate physics student at the University of Minnesota, and continued throughout his life. His works were primarily science fiction and fantasy, but he also produced mysteries and historical fiction.
Among his many honors, Anderson was a recipient of three Nebula awards, seven Hugo awards, three Prometheus awards, and an SFWA Grand Master award. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2000.
This collection consists of short stories and novellas published in Worlds of If, Galaxy SF, Fantastic Universe, and other periodicals. Presented in order of publication, they include Innocent at Large, a 1958 story coauthored with his wife and noted author Karen Anderson.
Description
Charles Dickens was a British author, journalist, and editor whose work brought attention to the struggles of Victorian England’s lower classes. His writings provided a candid portrait of the era’s poor and served as inspiration for social change.
Great Expectations, Dickens’ thirteenth novel, was first published in serial form between 1860 and 1861 and is widely praised as the author’s greatest literary accomplishment.
The novel follows the life, relationships, and moral development of an orphan boy named Pip. The novel begins when Pip encounters an escaped convict whom he helps and fears in equal measure. Pip’s actions that day set off a sequence of events and interactions that shape Pip’s character as he matures into adulthood.
The vivid characters, engaging narrative style, and universal themes of Great Expectations establish this novel as a timeless literary classic, and an engaging portrait of Victorian life.
Description
Tono-Bungay, published in 1909, is a semi-autobiographical novel by H. G. Wells. Though it has some fantastical and absurdist elements, it is a realist novel rather than one of Well’s “scientific romances.”
The novel is written in the first person from the point of view of George Ponderevo, the son of the housekeeper at a large estate. He is made to feel his inferiority when he is banished after fighting with the son of one of the owner’s aristocratic relatives, and is sent to live with his own poor but religiously fervent relatives. He can’t abide or agree with their religious views and returns to his mother who sends him on to live with his Uncle, Edward Ponderevo, then a local pharmacist in a small town. Uncle Ponderevo, though, has grand plans, and eventually makes a fortune by selling a quack patent medicine he calls “Tono-Bungay.” George joins him in this endeavour and becomes rich himself, eventually turning his interests towards the new science of aeronautics. Meanwhile the Tono-Bungay scheme expands enormously and begins to topple towards its own destruction.
Throughout the novel, George comments cynically on England’s class system, the shabbiness of commerce, and the lies told in advertising. We also follow his unfortunate love life, his unwise marriage, his divorce, and his eventual reconnection with a woman he loved as a child.
Tono-Bungay met with a mixed reception on first release, but has since come to be considered as perhaps Wells’ finest realist novel, an assessment Wells himself shared.
Description
The Iliad is one of the oldest works of Western literature, dating back to classical antiquity. Homer’s epic poem belongs in a collection called the Epic Cycle, which includes the Odyssey. It was originally written in ancient Greek and utilized a dactylic hexameter rhyme scheme. Although this rhyme scheme sounds beautiful in its native language, in modern English it can sound awkward and, as Eric McMillan humorously describes it, resembles “pumpkins rolling on a barn floor.” William Cullen Bryant avoided this problem by converting his translation into blank verse.
This epic poem begins with the Achaean army sacking the city of Chryse and capturing two maidens as prizes of war. One of the maidens, Chryseis, is given to Agamemnon, the leader of the Achaeans, and the other maiden, Briseis, was given to the army’s best warrior, Achilles. Chryseis’ father, the city’s priest, prays to the god Apollo and asks for a plague on the Achaean army. To stop this plague, Agamemnon returns Chryseis to her father, but then orders Achilles to give him Briseis as compensation. Achilles refuses.
Description
The Odyssey is one of the oldest works of Western literature, dating back to classical antiquity. Homer’s epic poem belongs in a collection called the Epic Cycle, which includes the Iliad. It was originally written in ancient Greek, utilizing a dactylic hexameter rhyme scheme. Although this rhyme scheme sounds beautiful in its native language, in modern English it can sound awkward and, as Eric McMillan humorously describes it, resembles “pumpkins rolling on a barn floor.” William Cullen Bryant avoided this problem by composing his translation in blank verse, a rhyme scheme that sounds natural in English.
This epic poem follows Ulysses, one of the Greek leaders that brought an end to the ten-year-long Trojan war. Longing for home, he travels across the Mediterranean Sea to return to his kingdom in Ithaca; unfortunately, our hero manages to anger Neptune, the god of the sea, making his trip home agonizingly slow and extremely dangerous. While Ulysses is trying to return home, his family in Ithaca is also in danger. Suitors have traveled to the home of Ulysses to marry his wife, Penelope, believing that her husband did not survive the war. These men are willing to kill anyone who stands in their way.
Description
Though better known as the editor for authors such as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, John W. Campbell also wrote science fiction under both his own and various pen names. Islands of Space was the second in his Arcot, Morey, and Wade trilogy. Originally published in the spring 1931 edition of Amazing Stories Quarterly, it was later published in book form in 1957.
After the events of The Black Star Passes, Arcot, Morey, Wade, and Fuller look for new challenges. Creating a spaceship that can exceed the speed of light, the four of them set out to explore other galaxies.
Description
Published in 1860, The Mill on the Floss was the second novel published by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans). Set in the late 1820s or early 1830s, it tells the story of two young people, Tom and Maggie Tulliver, from their childhood into early adulthood. Their father, Jeremy Tulliver, owns Dorlcote Mill on the river Floss, and the children grow to adolescence in relative comfort. However Mr. Tulliver is litigious and initiates an unwise legal suit against a local solicitor, Mr. Wakem. The suit is thrown out and the associated costs throw the Tulliver family into poverty, and they lose possession of the mill.
The main character of the novel is Maggie Tulliver, an intelligent and passionate child and young woman, whose mental, romantic, and moral struggles we follow closely. As in Eliot’s other novels, the author shows a realistic and sympathetic understanding of human behavior.
The Mill on the Floss is regarded as a classic of English literature, and has been made into both a film and a television series.
Description
Just William, published in 1922, was the first of a long series of well-loved books about William Brown, an eleven-year old English schoolboy, written by Richmal Crompton. William is continually scruffy and disreputable, and has a talent for getting into trouble and becoming involved in various inventive plots and scrapes, to the exasperation of his long-suffering parents and older siblings.
Crompton continued to write stories about the amusing adventures and mishaps of William Brown right up until her death in 1969. Some 39 book collections of stories about William were eventually published, entertaining several generations of children. Despite this, Crompton felt her real work was in writing novels for adults, of which she wrote some 41—most now forgotten and out of print.