Winter solstice

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Deidre Shauna Lynch

At the start of the eighteenth century, talk of literary "characters" referred as much to letters and typefaces as it did to persons in books. Yet by the nineteenth century, characters had become companions to their readers, friends with whom readers might spend time and empathize. Although the story of this shift is usually told in terms of the "rise of the individual," Deidre Shauna Lynch proposes an ingenious alternative interpretation. Elaborating a "pragmatics of character," Lynch shows how readers used transactions with characters to accommodate themselves to newly commercialized social relations. Searching for the inner meanings of characters allowed readers both to plumb their own inwardness and to distinguish themselves from others. In a culture of mass consumption, argues Lynch, possessing a belief in the inexpressible interior life of a character rendered one's property truly private.

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Thomas Hardy

<p>Like many of <a href=" novels, <i>The Mayor of Casterbridge</i> is set in the fictional county of Wessex in the mid 1800s. It begins with Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, drunk on rum, auctioning off his wife and baby daughter at a village fair. The next day, overcome with remorse, Henchard resolves to turn his life around. When we meet Henchard eighteen years later, temperance and hard work have made him wealthy and respectable. However, he cannot escape his past. His secret guilt, his pride, and his impulsive temper all serve to sabotage his good name.</p> <p><i>The Mayor of Casterbridge</i> was published in 1886, first as a magazine serial and then later that year as a book. It is perhaps most noteworthy for the psychological portrait of Michael Henchard, a tragic character who remains sympathetic while simultaneously being deeply flawed. Typical of other Hardy novels, it also vividly depicts life in the rural countryside at that time.</p>

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M.J. Carter

"Blake and Avery return in the stunning sequel to M. J. Carter's lauded fiction debut, The Strangler Vine. London, 1841. Returned from their adventures in India, Jeremiah Blake and William Avery have both had their difficulties adapting to life in Victorian England. Moreover, time and distance have weakened the close bond between them, forged in the jungles of India. Then a shocking series of murders in the world of London's gutter press forces them back together. The police seem mysteriously unwilling to investigate, then connections emerge between the murdered men and the growing and unpredictable movement demanding the right to vote for all. In the back streets of Drury Lane, among criminals, whores, pornographers, and missionaries, Blake and Avery must race against time to find the culprit before he kills again. But what if the murderer is being protected by some of the highest powers in the land?"--

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Daniel Defoe

These are the true confessions of a remarkable and passionate young woman are thought to have been based on the adventures of a real prisoner in Newgate where Moll was born. ostensibly written as a warning to wrongdoers, the moral of Defoe's candid and cautionary tale is often lost in the sheer vitality of Moll - one of the supreme characters of English comic fiction. Her fortunes and misfortunes - 'twelve years a Whore, five times a Wife (once to her own brother), twelve years a Thief, eight years a transported Felon' - plunge the reader into the exciting world of the eighteenth-century low life.