Word to the Wise

Elizabeth Gaskell is equally well known as Mrs Gaskell. When her mother died, she was three months old and she was sent to live in Knutsford, Cheshire with her Aunt Hannah, this setting would become...

Elizabeth Gaskell is equally well known as Mrs Gaskell. When her mother died, she was three months old and she was sent to live in Knutsford, Cheshire with her Aunt Hannah, this setting would become...

Born on November 5th 1850 in Johnstown, Wisconsin, Ella Wheeler was the youngest of four children. She began to write as a child and by the time she graduated was already well known as a poet...

Born on November 5th 1850 in Johnstown, Wisconsin, Ella Wheeler was the youngest of four children. She began to write as a child and by the time she graduated was already well known as a poet...

"To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise."Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground is both a fictional and philosophical work. It is considered by many critics as an early...

George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26th, 1856 in Synge Street, Dublin. His career began modestly initially working for some years in an Estate office but a thirst for reading and knowledge moved...

Mary Anne Evans was born in 1819. Her Father did not consider her a great beauty and thought her chances of marriage were slim. He therefore invested in her education and by the time she was 16 she...

The fictitious landscape of Loamshire provides the setting for this country tragedy, with little peace about the intertwined lives of its inhabitants. Dinah Morris is an earnest Methodist preacher...

George Eliot was a great literary talent. With classics such as Silas Marner, 'Middlemarch' and 'Adam Bede' her reputation was set for eternity. Yet she produced other works just as compelling. Just...

George Eliot opens her complex study of life in the provincial Midlands with a brilliant portrait of Dorothea Brooke in all her strengths and weaknesses. Dorothea's misguided marriage is only one of...

George Eliot was a great literary talent. With classics such as Silas Marner, 'Middlemarch' and 'Adam Bede' her reputation was set for eternity. Yet she produced other works just as compelling. Just...

"There's nothing kills a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself..."George Eliot's Silas Marner is a 19th-century tale of injustice, betrayal, love and faith. It tells the story...

The protagonist in George Eliot's autobiographical novel, The Mill on The Floss, is a 19th-century English girl named Maggie Tulliver who is believed to stand for the author of the novel. Maggie...

"There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less." Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (29 May 1874 - 14 June 1936) was a poet, novelist,...

"Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority."The Man Who Knew Too Much is a compilation of eight detective stories by the English...

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, FRSE, was a Scottish playwright, novelist and poet who became the first English-language author to be internationally celebrated within their own lifetime. Although he...

"Summer afternoon-summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language." In An International Episode, Henry James introduces his readers to his...

"She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS." Daisy Miller is a novella by Henry James that tells the story of a beautiful American young woman who enjoys living as an expatriate in Europe. She...

"I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it."...

"I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all." The Aspern Papers is one of the novellas written by Henry James in the late-nineteenth...

"Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live" The Death of the Lion is a novella by the prolific American novelist Henry James first...

"Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal." Henry James's The Pupil is a short story whose events center around a teen-age pupil named Morgan Moreen and his...

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1st, 1819 the third of eight children. At age 7 he contracted scarlet fever which was to permanently diminish his eyesight. By 12 his Father,...

"Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its jagged edges." Herman Melville's Billy Budd is a work of fiction that delves into philosophical questions such as justice, law and destiny. It tells...

"A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities."Herman Melville's The Piazza Tales is a collection of six classic short stories first published together in 1856. The stories are mainly about...

"You can still die when the sun is shining."The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a novel by the Irish writer James Joyce. It is often classified by critics as a "fictional auto-biography"...

"Better be without sense than misapply it as you do."Jane Austen's Emma (1815) explores the life of women in Regency England, combining romance with some aspects of the comedy of manners. The story...

"Facts are such horrid things!" Jane Austen's Lady Susan (1871) is an epistolary novella centering around the character of an attractive and flirtatious widow who is after a second marriage. Lady...

"Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure." The protagonist in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is Fanny Price, a young girl who is raised in the house of her...

"There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature." Northanger Abbey is one of Jane Austen's earliest novels which...