Books

First published in the year 1917, the present novel ‘The Job: An American Novel’ by American novelist Sinclair Lewis is considered an early declaration of the rights of working women. The plot focuses on the main character, Una Golden, and her desire to establish herself in a legitimate occupation while balancing the eventual need for marriage. The story takes place in the early 1900-1920s and takes Una from a small Pennsylvania town to New York. Forced to work due to family illness, Una shows a talent for the traditional male bastion of commercial real estate and, while valued by her company, she struggles to achieve the same status of her male coworkers.

First published in the year 1857, the present book ‘Barchester Towers’ by Anthony Trollope is part of his series known as the “Chronicles of Barsetshire”. Among other things it satirises the then raging antipathy in the Church of England between High Church and Evangelical adherents.

“ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.” -an excerpt

“When a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for Soames, Enoch. It was as I feared: he was not there. But everybody else was. Many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or remembered but faintly, lived again for me, they and their work, in Mr. Holbrook Jackson’s pages. The book was as thorough as it was brilliantly written. and thus the omission found by me was an all the deadlier record of poor Soames’s failure to impress himself on his decade.” -an excerpt

First published in the year 1759, the present novel ‘A Political Romance’ by famous novelist Laurence Sterne can be considered a mock-epic allegory that describes a provincial squabble between a church-lawyer, an archbishop and a Dean, i.e. a “Lilliputian” satire on ecclesiastical politics in Sterne’s York. (courtesy: wikipedia)

First published in the year 1908, the present fantasy fiction novel ‘The Magician’ by British author W. Somerset Maugham is about a magician Oliver Haddo, a caricature of Aleister Crowley, who attempts to create life.

First published in the year 1666, the present book ‘Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners’ is a Puritan spiritual autobiography written by John Bunyan. It was written while Bunyan was serving a twelve-year prison sentence in Bedford gaol for preaching without a license.

The present book ‘The Journal to Stella’ is a collection of 65 letters that Jonatham Swift wrote to his friend Esther Johnson, whom he called Stella and whom he may have secretly married. This collection was first published in the year 1766.

First published in the year 1844, the present novel ‘Barry Lyndon’ by William Thackeray is about a member of the Irish gentry trying to become a member of the English aristocracy.

First published in the year 1849, the present novel ‘Shirley’ by one of the most famous novelists of the Victoirian era and one of the famous three Bronte sisters in the English literary history – Charlotte Brontë. The novel is set in Yorkshire in the period 1811–12, during the industrial depression resulting from the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. The novel is set against a backdrop of the Luddite uprisings in the Yorkshire textile industry.

“On the last day of May 1902 the signature at Pretoria of the conditions of peace brought to an end a war which had lasted for nearly three years, and had among other things destroyed a government, dissolved a society, and laid waste a country. In those last months of fighting some progress had been made with the reconstruction—at least with that not unimportant branch of it which is concerned with the machinery of government. A working administration had been put together, new ordinances in the form of proclamations had been issued, departments had been created and the chief appointments made, the gold industry was beginning to set its house in order, refugees were returning, and already political theories were being mooted and future parties foreshadowed. But it is from the conclusion of peace that the work of resettlement may fairly be taken to commence. Before that date the restrictions of war limited all civil activity; not till the shackles were removed and the civil power left in sole possession does a fair field appear either for approval or criticism.” -Introduction

First published in the year 1899, the present book ‘War is Kind’ is a collection of poems by American poet, novelist, and short story writer Stephen Crane. This collection was published less than an year before the author’s death. The title belongs to the first poem in his second poetry collection which is about war and its effects.

First published in the year 1922, the present novel ‘Aaron’s Rod’ was written by famous English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter – DH Lawrence. The title has its reference in the Bible’s Old testament.

First published in the year 1909, the present novel ‘Martin Eden’ by famous novelist Jack London tells the story of a young proletarian autodidact struggling to become a writer. The central theme of Eden’s developing artistic sensibilities places the novel in the tradition of the Künstlerroman, in which is narrated the formation and development of an artist.

First published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869, the present novel ‘Little Women’ by American author Louisa May Alcott follows the lives of four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March—detailing their passage from childhood to womanhood, and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters.

First published in a serialized form in Charles Dickens’ magazine ‘All the Year Round’, the present novel ‘The Moonstone’ by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century British epistolary novel. This work reflected Collins’ enlightened social attitudes in his treatment of the servants in the novel.