Captain Wentworth's Diary

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Georgette Heyer

The spirited and independent Miss Annis Wychwood is a beautiful heiress, and hopelessly single, has twenty-nine and well past the age for falling in love. When she sponsored young pretty Miss Lucilla Carleton's "coming out," the town's social elite were shocked. After all, how could Annis find Lucilla a husband when she could not choose one for herself? Then Lucilla's handsome and egotistical uncle and guardian, Mr. Oliver Carleton, arrived to approve the sponsorship. But when Annis embroils herself in the affairs of the runaway heiress, Lucilla, she is destined to see a great deal of her fugitive's uncivil and high-handed guardian, Oliver. Befriending the wayward girl brings unexpected consequences, among them the conflicting emotions aroused by her guardian, whose reputation as the rudest man in London precedes him. Chafing at the restrictions of Regency society in Bath, Annis has to admit that at least Carleton is never boring. And his brash and rakish manner quickly succumbed to the will of Annis, this remarkable heiress no man had yet subdued. Outrageous as he is, the charming Annis ends up finding him absolutely irresistible.

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Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

This is the first study of puritan women's place in early modern intellectual culture. Puritan women have suffered a double prejudice: that women were excluded from male culture, and that puritanism was hostile to many forms of culture. This collection argues that early modern women's puritanism formed and developed rather than prohibited their substantial and leading contributions to their culture. The essays introduce recently discovered writers such as Elizabeth Isham and Elizabeth Melville and new analyses of well-known writers such as Lady Mary Sidney Herbert and Anne Locke, and also highlight the local, national, and international dimensions of early modern puritan culture. With a foreword by N. H. Keeble and afterword by David Norbrook and fifteen essays by leading scholars of early modern literature and history, this collection reveals an intellectual culture characterized by networks of patronage, translation, manuscript circulation and correspondence. - Publisher.

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Kathy J. Phillips

From her first book to her last, Virginia Woolf consistently satirized British society. Only in recent years, however, has Woolf been recognized as a political thinker, let alone one with a sophisticated grasp of complex ideologies. In Virginia Woolf against Empire, Kathy J. Phillips makes a major contribution to the growing recognition of Woolf as a cultural commentator. Phillips argues that Woolf satirizes social institutions largely through incongruous juxtapositions that link empire making, militarism, and gender relations. One of Woolf's key insights, Phillips shows, is her exposure of a pervasive cultural image that equates women and land - a metaphor resulting from her culture's displacement of sexuality onto militarism and the transference of the individual's need to be included into an all-embracing empire. As Woolf's novels demonstrate, the metaphor works in both directions: to corrupt the relation of men to women with possessiveness and to turn England's relation to its colonies into a kind of substitute for sexual gratification. A unique feature of this study is Phillips's investigation of how Leonard Woolf's books on colonialism specifically influenced Virginia Woolf's novels and vice versa. Virginia Woolf drew her concepts of political systems and theories from her husband's anti-imperialist writings. Phillips also shows how specific factual details from Leonard Woolf's books help to illuminate some of Virginia Woolf's metaphors and allusions.

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Karen O'Brien

Is there a common European identity? If so, what kinds of history does it possess? Narratives of Enlightenment examines the literary and historical achievements of major figures such as Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon and the American historian David Ramsay in the light of eighteenth-century political and national debates in France, Scotland, England and America. Undertaking a comparative reappraisal of these writers, Karen O'Brien investigates the degree and nature of their intellectual investments in the idea of a common European civilisation. This original and incisive study intervenes from the perspective of literary criticism in contemporary debates about Enlightenments past and present, the political uses for narrative, and the European contexts of national awareness.