First published in 1994, these two volumes are intended as a supplement to the four-volume edition edited by Gordon N. Ray in 1945-46. In writing to his broad range of correspondents, Thackeray produced a varied body of letters that will help readers to better understand his nineteenth-century society as well as his professional and private life — especially his relationships with women. These volumes contain 1713 letters: 1464 to and from Thackeray that were not included in the earlier volumes, and 249 with texts that have been edited from newly available manuscripts, and that thereby replace texts that were printed in Ray from incomplete sources.
First published in 1994, these two volumes are intended as a supplement to the four-volume edition edited by Gordon N. Ray in 1945-46. In writing to his broad range of correspondents, Thackeray produced a varied body of letters that will help readers to better understand his nineteenth-century society as well as his professional and private life — especially his relationships with women. These volumes contain 1713 letters: 1464 to and from Thackeray that were not included in the earlier volumes, and 249 with texts that have been edited from newly available manuscripts, and that thereby replace texts that were printed in Ray from incomplete sources.
This correspondence, which encompasses Truman's courtship of his wife, his service in the senate, his presidency, and after, reveals not only the character of Truman's mind but also a shrewd observer's view of American politics.
The present volume makes available the inimitable Notebook of Anton Chekhov as well as those passages from Chekhov's correspondence that reveal his innermost beliefs as a writer and a man. His lively opinions on the theatre, on stories and novels, on literary figures like Zola, Tolstoy and Gorky, the clinical detachment of Chekhov the physician always tempered by the tender concern and involvement of the artist with his people and his times, make this a lasting and universal testament. From early reviews of the Notebook of Anton Chekhov, included in this collection: "It is extraordinary how interesting these notes on human nature are... The charm of this book is that the reader has the sensation of perfectly intimate, easy intercourse with Chekhov himself. While that intercourse lasts the reader himself feels observant, gentle, disillusioned, humorous and wise." - New Statesman "The years covered by the Notebook are from 1892 to 1904, the year of Chekhov's death. The notes ranging from random jottings for plays and novels to passages of profound meditation on life and death were made for works which Chekhov intended to write. They show his methods of artistic production. The fact that he re-copied most of this material into a special copy book that shows the significance which he attached to it." - Boston Transcript "The whole is a document interesting to writers and to anyone curious about human nature... Chekhov is not a writer who sees life steadily and sees it whole; watching him at work in his kitchen we become aware that he has his favorite ingredients; they are spread out before us uncooked, undisguised with sauces." - London Times ""Affords us a very well-rounded interpretation of Chekhov." - Kenneth Burke, New York Times
A rich and evocative portrait of one of the greatest authors of Victorian England Who was William Makepeace Thackeray? Was he the wealthy dilettante who came to London in the 1830s and squandered his fortune on newspapers? Was he the impoverished freelance author of the 1840s who scrapped for every penny he could get? Or was he the great writer who published Vanity Fair in 1847, skewering Victorian society and ensuring his literary legacy? Throughout the many phases of his life, Thackeray remained an enigma. He was friendly but standoffish, generous yet miserly, confident and utterly terrified of failure. A century and a half after Thackeray’s death, D. J. Taylor has produced a biography that tackles the complexities of these contradictions and restores Thackeray to his place in the literary pantheon. His fortune lost by the time he was thirty, his personal life in constant torment, Thackeray’s story is as dramatic as that of any of his characters. In Thackeray, the man can finally be seen in full.
For the first time, novelist Iris Murdoch's life in her own words, from girlhood to her last years Iris Murdoch was an acclaimed novelist and groundbreaking philosopher whose life reflected her unconventional beliefs and values. But what has been missing from biographical accounts has been Murdoch's own voice—her life in her own words. Living on Paper—the first major collection of Murdoch's most compelling and interesting personal letters—gives, for the first time, a rounded self-portrait of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers and thinkers. With more than 760 letters, fewer than forty of which have been published before, the book provides a unique chronicle of Murdoch's life from her days as a schoolgirl to her last years. The result is the most important book about Murdoch in more than a decade. The letters show a great mind at work—struggling with philosophical problems, trying to bring a difficult novel together, exploring spirituality, and responding pointedly to world events. They also reveal her personal life, the subject of much speculation, in all its complexity, especially in letters to lovers or close friends, such as the writers Brigid Brophy, Elias Canetti, and Raymond Queneau, philosophers Michael Oakeshott and Philippa Foot, and mathematician Georg Kreisel. We witness Murdoch's emotional hunger, her tendency to live on the edge of what was socially acceptable, and her irreverence and sharp sense of humor. We also learn how her private life fed into the plots and characters of her novels, despite her claims that they were not drawn from reality. Direct and intimate, these letters bring us closer than ever before to Iris Murdoch as a person, making for an extraordinary reading experience.
This book explores the puzzling phenomenon of new veiling practices among lower middle class women in Cairo, Egypt. Although these women are part of a modernizing middle class, they also voluntarily adopt a traditional symbol of female subordination. How can this paradox be explained? An explanation emerges which reconceptualizes what appears to be reactionary behavior as a new style of political struggle--as accommodating protest. These women, most of them clerical workers in the large government bureaucracy, are ambivalent about working outside the home, considering it a change which brings new burdens as well as some important benefits. At the same time they realize that leaving home and family is creating an intolerable situation of the erosion of their social status and the loss of their traditional identity. The new veiling expresses women's protest against this. MacLeod argues that the symbolism of the new veiling emerges from this tense subcultural dilemma, involving elements of both resistance and acquiescence.
Fathers are often neglected in histories of family life in Britain. Family Men provides the first academic study of fathers and families in the period from the First World War to the end of the 1950s. It takes a thematic approach, examining different aspects of fatherhood, from the duties it encompassed to the ways in which it related to men's identities. The historical approach is socio-cultural: each chapter examines a wide range of historical source materials in order to analyse both cultural representations of fatherhood and related social norms, as well as exploring the practices and experiences of individuals and families. It uncovers the debates surrounding parenting and family life and tells the stories of men and their children. While many historians have examined men's relationship to the home and family in histories of gender, family life, domestic spaces, and class cultures more generally, few have specifically examined fathers as crucial family members, as historical actors, and as emotional individuals. The history of fatherhood is extremely significant to contemporary debate: assumptions about fatherhood in the past are constantly used to support arguments about the state of fatherhood today and the need for change or otherwise in the future. Laura King charts men's changing experiences of fatherhood, suggesting that although the roles and responsibilities fulfilled by men did not shift rapidly, their relationships, position in the family, and identities underwent significant change between the start of the First World War and the 1960s.
