The Virgin and the Gypsy is a short story by English author D. H. Lawrence, about personal and sexual liberation. It was written in 1926 and published posthumously in 1930. The Virgin and the Gypsy has become a classic and is one of Lawrence’s most vibrant short novels.
Deborah Epstein Nord traces the nearly ubiquitous British preoccupation with Gypsies in imaginative works by John Clare, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, and D. H. Lawrence. She also exhumes lesser-known literary, ethnographic, and historical texts, exploring the fascinating histories of the nomadic writer George Borrow, the Gypsy Lore Society, Dora Yates, and other rarely examined figures and institutions. These textual representations are characterized by a tension between Gypsies as an alien, often despised "race" and the psychic or aesthetic desire to dissolve the boundary between English and Gypsy worlds. Nord suggests that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, romantic identification with Gypsies hardened into caricature and served to obscure the realities of Gypsy life and history. This phenomenon is reflected most famously in The Virgin and the Gipsy, in which D. H. Lawrence both exploits and criticizes the myth of Gypsies' unfettered sensuality, closeness to nature, and opposition to the oppressive strictures of modern life.
The shocking poignant story of eviction, expulsion, and the hard-scrabble fight for a home They are reviled. For centuries the Roma have wandered Europe; during the Holocaust half a million were killed. After World War II and during the Troubles, a wave of Irish Travellers moved to England to make a better, safer life. They found places to settle down – but then, as Occupy was taking over Wall Street and London, the vocal Dale Farm community in Essex was evicted from their land. Many did not leave quietly; they put up a legal and at times physical fight. Award-winning journalist Katharine Quarmby takes us into the heat of the battle, following the Sheridan, McCarthy, Burton and Townsley families before and after the eviction, from Dale Farm to Meriden and other trouble spots. Based on exclusive access over the course of seven years and rich historical research, No Place to Call Home is a stunning narrative of long-sought justice.
A supernatural thriller of chilling carnage and haunting beauty, Bloodline Gypsy unearths the origin of a mythical creature that has plagued history since the dark ages. Tracing an inherent line of magic back to Egypt in 981 AD, this dark fantasy reveals the mysterious link between gypsies and werewolves. A yoke that, twelve hundred years later, reveals itself in the form of a birthmark stamped on children born of Louvari descent. When Susannah Henika loses her mother in a tragic accident, she moves to a mountain resort town to live with a father she has never known. She soon falls victim to night terrors and an impending sense of dread. She meets a woman in the woods, Madalina Sadrinovic, whose uncanny ways set Susannah ill at ease. Strange and foreboding events follow the arrival of Madalinas twin brother Luca. A local boy goes missing. The American teenager begins to suspect that somehow linked to the strange markings on her hand she may be one of the last remaining humans, genetically predestined to bear the offspring of an altered species her ancestor forged into the world.
November 1925: In search of health and sun, the writer D. H. Lawrence arrives on the Italian Riviera with his wife, Frieda, and is exhilarated by the view of the sparkling Mediterranean from his rented villa, set amid olives and vines. But over the next six months, Frieda will be fatally attracted to their landlord, a dashing Italian army officer. This incident of infidelity influenced Lawrence to write two short stories, “Sun” and “The Virgin and the Gypsy,” in which women are drawn to earthy, muscular men, both of which prefigured his scandalous novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In DH Lawrence in Italy, Owen reconstructs the drama leading up to the creation of one of the most controversial novels of all time by drawing on the unpublished letters and diaries of Rina Secker, the Anglo-Italian wife of Lawrence’s publisher. In addition to telling the story of the origins of Lady Chatterley, DH Lawrence in Italy explores Lawrence’s passion for all things Italian, tracking his path to the Riviera from Lake Garda to Lerici, Abruzzo, Capri, Sicily, and Sardinia.
From #1 international bestselling author Ami McKay comes The Virgin Cure, the story of a young girl abandoned and forced to fend for herself in the poverty and treachery of post-Civil War New York City. McKay, whose debut novel The Birth House made headlines around the world, returns with a resonant tale inspired by her own great-great-grandmother’s experiences as a pioneer of women’s medicine in nineteenth-century New York. One summer night in Lower Manhattan in 1871, twelve-year-old Moth is pulled from her bed and sold as a servant to a finely dressed woman. Knowing that her mother is so close while she is locked away in servitude, Moth bides her time until she can escape, only to find her old home deserted and her mother gone without a trace. Moth must struggle to survive alone in the murky world of the Bowery, a wild and lawless enclave filled with thieves, beggars, sideshow freaks, and prostitutes. She eventually meets Miss Everett, the proprietress of an "Infant School," a brothel that caters to gentlemen who pay dearly for "willing and clean" companions—desirable young virgins like Moth. She also finds friendship with Dr. Sadie, a female physician struggling against the powerful forces of injustice. The doctor hopes to protect Moth from falling prey to a terrible myth known as the "virgin cure"—the tragic belief that deflowering a "fresh maid" can cleanse the blood and heal men afflicted with syphilis—which has destroyed the lives of other Bowery girls. Ignored by society and unprotected by the law, Moth dreams of independence. But there's a high price to pay for freedom, and no one knows that better than a girl from Chrystie Street. In a powerful novel that recalls the evocative fiction Anita Shreve, Annie Proulx, and Joanne Harris, Ami McKay brings to light the story of early, forward-thinking social warriors, creating a narrative that readers will find inspiring, poignant, adventure-filled, and utterly unforgettable.
Now available in a new edition, this book is photographer Iain Mckell's extraordinary and breathtakingly beautiful glimpse into the lives of present-day nomads whose culture is built around ideals of freedom, nature, and simplicity. With sensitivity and honesty he captures a way of life that seems at once romantic, strange, beautiful, and simple. The result is a deeply insightful portrayal of a culture that eschews the traditional creature comforts of urban life in favor of the simplicity and freedom of the natural world.
"Here she found a jealously guarded culture - a society made, in part, of lawlessness and defiance of non-Gypsy norms - that nonetheless made room for her, "a privileged American in a Mediterranean underworld." As her relationship with the Espinas family changed over the years from mutual bafflement to a deep-rooted friendship, Eberstadt found herself a part of Gypsy life, moving about in a large group whose core included Moise, his wife, her sister, and their children - at cockfights, in storefront churches, at malls, in their homes, and at their rehearsals, discovering lives lived "between biblical laws and strip-mall consumerism" - and always accompanied by the intense and infectious beat of their heart-stopping music."--BOOK JACKET.
From “the master of the international thriller” (The New York Times) and the bestselling author of Tatiana and Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith’s first mystery novel—a classic crime whodunit with a shocking twist. One girl was dead, one girl was threatened, one girl was possessed. One girl was found horribly mutilated, the victim of a rite that no sane person believed could take place in the modern world. One girl lay trembling in her apartment, as the strange intruders forced open her bedroom door, and the waking nightmare began. And one girl discovered that her body and her soul were no longer her own.... A murder threatens to force the police into a confrontation with New York’s gypsy community. The cops are determined to pin the blame on a gypsy. But antique dealer Roman Grey knows there is more to the case than the convenient closing of a crime file, and he vows to bring the truly guilty to justice. You’ll never guess the secret of Gypsy in Amber.
A provocative social history examines the history of virginity and of noted virgins in Western culture, describing the unique fascination civilization has had for virginity from a social, political, economic, philosophical, medical, and legal standpoint. Reprint.