Hedda Gabler

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Edward Albee

George, a disillusioned academic, and Martha, his caustic wife, have just come home from a faculty party. When a handsome young professor and his mousy wife stop by for a nightcap, an innocent night of fun and games quickly turns dark and dangerous. Long-buried resentment and rage are unleashed as George and Martha turn their rapier-sharp wits against each other, using their guests as pawns in their verbal sparring. By night's end, the secrets of both couples are uncovered and the lies they cling to are exposed. Considered by many to be Albee's masterpiece.

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Laura Kipnis

"Breathing new life into age-old questions, each of the four chapters of "The Female Thing" takes a hot-button issue of feminism and femininity and turns the usual story around."--BOOK JACKET.

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Stanley Cavell

What is marriage? Can a relationship dedicated to equality, friendship, and mutual education flower in an atmosphere of romance? What are the paths between loving another and knowing another? Stanley Cavell identified a genre of classic American films that engaged these questions in his study of comedies of remarriage, Pursuits of Happiness. With Contesting Tears, Cavell demonstrates that a contrasting genre, which he calls "the melodrama of the unknown woman," shares a surprising number and weave of concerns with those comedies. Cavell provides close readings of four melodramas he finds definitive of the genre: Letter from an Unknown Woman; Gaslight; Now, Voyager; and Stella Dallas. The women in these melodramas, like the women in the comedies, demand equality, shared education, and transfiguration, exemplifying for Cavell a moral perfectionism he identifies as Emersonian. But unlike the comedies, which portray a quest for a shared existence of expressiveness and joy, the melodramas trace instead the woman's recognition that in this quest she is isolated. Part of the melodrama concerns the various ways the men in the films (and the audiences of the films) interpret and desire to force the woman's consequent inaccessibility.

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ada[ted by Tim Luscombe

Anne Elliot fell deeply in love with a handsome young naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, at the age of nineteen. But because he had neither fortune nor rank to recommend him, Anne's mentor and friend, Lady Russell, persuaded her to break off the engagement. Eight years later, Anne has lived to regret her decision. She never stopped loving Frederick and when he returns from sea a Captain, she can only watch as every eligible young woman falls at his feet. Can the pair rekindle a love that was lost but not forgotten?