First published as a serial from August 1864 to January 1866 in the Cornhill Magazine, the story revolves around Molly Gibson, the only daughter of a widowed doctor living in a provincial English town in the 1830s. When Gaskell died suddenly in 1865, it was not quite complete, and the last section was written by Frederick Greenwood. Continue reading →.

After a deal with publisher Simon & Schuster Inc, Amazon is adding 5,000 more books to their Kindle ebook store bringing the total amount of ebooks available to 125,000. Read an article about it here. Now if only they’d put up Wide Sargasso Sea and some Georgette Heyer ebooks, I mght plunk down some money … Continue reading →.

SILLY Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them – the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of all these – a composite order of feminine fatuity, that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species. Continue reading →.

An article in LaptopMag.com talks about the new OLPC (one laptop per child) computer. Smaller than the previous OLPC laptop, it has some pretty neat features. “The design will provide a right and left page in vertical format, a hinged laptop in horizontal format, and a flat, two-screen continuous surface for use in tablet mode.” … Continue reading →.

Fanny Burney’s second novel is the story a young and beautiful heiress whose army of suitors is made up of gentlemen, scoundrels, and many others who are not what they seem. Admired by Jane Austen and other contemporaries, it is said that the title for Pride and Prejudice is taken from the last pages of this novel. Continue reading →.

As in her other novels, Eliot spends much introductory time on her main characters, many minor characters and their histories. It is not until halfway through the story that all the elements start to fall together. At this point, The Mill on the Floss is hard to put down. Continue reading →.

Published in July 1814, Mansfield Park is the story of Fanny Price who has been raised by her wealthy aunt and uncle as charity to her mother who married poorly. Treated as inferior by everyone except her cousin Edmund, Fanny’s gratitude toward Edmund secretly grows into love. As suitors and other lovers come into the picture, the plot thickens and emotions run high in true Austen style. Continue reading →.

Much shorter than Middlemarch, Silas Marner ironically takes a bit longer for the reader to become involved with the story. It starts almost too simply: Silas Marner, a weaver living in a religious community, is unjustly accused of theft, expelled, and becomes a recluse in another small village called Raveloe. Continue reading →.

In site news, we have an updated blog design. It’s a magazine layout and will hopefully help you to better find what you’re looking for. We plan to change the design of the rest of the site to match the blog in the near future. We hope you like it, and please send feedback.

Legends of Vancouver was originally published around 1910 as a series of newspaper articles based on stories related by Pauline Johnson’s friend, Chief Joe Capilano of the Squamish people. It is the first collection of native legends retold by a native artist and has become a classic of Canadian literature. Continue reading →.