Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Art & Literature

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” Jane Austen at her witty, observant, intelligent, and sympathetic best, in this collection of her letters written to family and friends. Compiled by her niece Fanny Knight’s son Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen (the first Baron Brabourne), and edited by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, this collection includes a preface written by the editor and notes from Lord Brabourne. It was originally published in 1892.

In the novel Little Women, Mr. March goes off to war. But in real life, it was Jo March (Louisa May Alcott herself, an avowed abolitionist) who traveled to Washington to nurse Northern soldiers. This is Alcott’s memoir but she chose to use the pseudonym “Tribulation Periwinkle” to tell her story. Despite the subject matter, her account is full of amusing anecdotes as she makes her way alone from Concord, Massachusetts to DC, trying to finagle a free ticket and convinced she will drown during the journey.

In 1895 the Irish playwright, novelist, and poet Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labour for the crime of "gross indecency with men". Robert Sherard met Wilde a decade earlier in Paris and their friendship, though often troubled, was maintained until the end of Wilde's life. Written for private publication, Sherard's account of their friendship aimed to restore Wilde's good name among his circle of friends. The result is a fascinating insight into the lives of the literary elites of London and Paris of the time. 

Cari Beauchamp masterfully combines biography with social and cultural history to examine the lives of Frances Marion and her many female colleagues who shaped filmmaking from the early teens through the 1940s. Frances Marion was Hollywood's highest paid screenwriter - male or female - for almost three decades, wrote almost 200 produced films and remains the only woman to win two Academy Awards for original screenwriting (The Big House and The Champ).

Upton Sinclair was first and foremost the most eminent and impactful muckraking journalist of the early 20th century (The Jungle - 1906: precipitated meaningful and permanent improvements in the safety and purity of the food we eat). 

Some Eminent Women of Our Times (which has been renamed Some Eminent Women of the 19th century) was written by Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett in 1889. It is available in the public domain and contains short biographies of various women who achieved great things both socially and in the literary field. The women Dame Millicent includes were singled out by her because of their unstinting dedication, selflessness, and in many cases bravery to do what they thought was right.

Arthur Ransome brilliantly wrote about Oscar Wilde in A Critical Study, published in 1912, and then went on to write the popular and better known children's series, Swallows and Amazons, in 1930. Ransome considers Oscar Wilde a visionary of whom every classical scholar must know. Oscar Wilde changed the culture of his own day and, by doing so, changed ours. Wilde tried various literary activities, poetry, drama, dialogues and essays, a novel, and even wrote about interior decoration. To him, art was supreme, and he pursued that ideal in every expression that he encountered.

John Pollen (1855-1923) was an official in the Indian Civil Service. A keen linguist, he learned Russian, Esperanto, and Persian and in 1915 published an English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. His collection contains 158 quatrains and includes a set of seven prefatory quatrains by Andrew Lang and a foreword by the Aga Khan.

(Richard Henry Stoddard) began long enough ago to have had his early poetry refused by Poe because it was too good to be the work of an obscure stripling. From 1870 to 1873, he was a confidential clerk to George B. McClellan in the New York dock department, and from 1874 to 1875 city librarian of New York. He was a literary reviewer for the New York World (1860–1870); one of the editors of Vanity Fair; editor of The Aldine (1869–1879), and literary editor of the Mail and the Mail and Express (1880–1903).

Thomas Love Peacock is today remembered as the author of seven satirical novels which many regard merely as literary curiosities. However, he was also a man of considerable learning, a skilled poet, and an astute literary critic. This collection includes Recollections of Thomas Love Peacock, an affectionate reminiscence by Sir Edward Strachey; Some Recollections of Childhood, a window into Peacock's early youth; "Four Ages of Poetry", in which he pokes fun at his contemporaries; and "The Last Day of Windsor Forest", an old man's recollection of a memorable episode.

Despite living a short life, and having a relatively small output, John Keats (1795-1821) has become one of the most celebrated English poets. This brief biography covers the important events of his life and provides a charming portrait of one of the most appealing and tragic figures of English literature.

Originally published in 1905, Daughters of the Puritans captures the lives of seven extraordinary American women from the New England area, whose influential writings and work in the nineteenth century transformed the nation.