Showing results by narrator "Anne Flosnik" in All Categories

Written when women---and workers generally---had few rights in England, Agnes Grey exposes the brutal inequities of the rigid class system in mid-19th-century Britain. Agnes comes from a respectable middle-class family, but their financial reverses have forced her to seek work as a governess.

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, tells the story of Mole, Water Rat, Badger, and Toad. The story takes place along a peaceful riverbank surrounded by lush meadows. Mole is originally from a neighboring meadow, but one fine spring day he ventures away from his home and finds the magical life of the river awaiting him. Mole quickly becomes fast friends with Water Rat, a polite and civilized creature who invites Mole to live with him while he teaches Mole the secrets of river life.

Spanning half a century of Elizabethan and Jacobean history and sweeping from the lowest reaches of society to the royal court, this richly textured novel tells the real story of Shakespeare in love.

Lady Charlotte Cavendish is still the spirited girl who tried to elope in the name of love. That dream was thwarted by her father, who trapped her in a loveless, passionless marriage. But now widowed, Charlotte is free to reenter the giddy world of the ton - and pursue her desires. Hardly a typical widow, she remains innocent of pleasures of the flesh. Yet now that her life is finally her own, she intends to keep it that way.

Maria just gave birth to her first child, a beautiful daughter, but the event is shrouded in sorrow. A month earlier, Maria’s husband, Lord Kersey, was killed in a duel under compromising circumstances. Worse, Maria’s failure to provide a male heir has stripped her of any hope of an inheritance. Scorned by the ton, one of her few allies is her late husband’s steward, Hugh Granger. Hugh is everything her husband was not - warm, charming...and penniless. Hugh has fallen desperately in love with Maria but has little to offer but comfort.

Sexism in Narnia? Or Screwtape? Or amongst the Inklings? Many critics have labelled C.S. Lewis a sexist, even a misogynist. The younger Lewis was criticized for a mysterious living arrangement with a woman, but his later marriage to an American poet, Joy Davidman, became a celebrated love story. As a writer he, along with J.R.R. Tolkien, formed a legendary literary group, the Inklings - but without women. In this collection of short essays, opinion pieces, and interviews, academics and writers come together to investigate these accusations.

Diana Vertue, known in an earlier life as the terrifying esper Jenny Psycho, had been a hardcore terrorist and a saint of the uber-esper Mater Mundi, but she'd outgrown both those roles. Now it’s time for a psychic showdown with the Mater Mundi herself.

The Blood Runners are an ancient culture, possessors of occult knowledge and power. Isolated in the forbidden Obeah system, they conduct horrific experiments exploring the nature of suffering, death, and immortality. And the person Owen Deathstalker cares for most has fallen into their aberrant clutches. But Owen’s Madness Maze-given powers appear to have abandoned him after the exhausting battle of Lachrymae Christi.

The armies of Shub have come to the planet Loki, and the over-extended parliament of the New Republic can only send the legendary hero Jack Random and his loose-cannon companion Ruby Journey to do their damnedest with the powers they’ve acquired from the Madness Maze. But when they get to the mining planet, they find the colony engaged in a civil war, with the representative government in the hands of unsavory profiteers who are at war with justifiably aggrieved rebel forces, who have unjustifiably aligned themselves with the rogue AIs of Shub.

Raised in the backwater province of Crowthorne, Cara finds her fate bound to a system she despises and a goddess she no longer believes in. When it becomes clear that the heir to the Elbian throne has found disfavor in the eyes of the goddess, Cara is ordained by blood to take her cousin's place as heir apparent.

A central figure in Christian tradition, Mary of Nazareth is both pivotal in theologies of the incarnation and a source of theological controversy. In this volume, bible scholar and priest Christopher Bryan examines the role of Mary in the theology of the first generations of Christians. Considering every reference to Mary in the New Testament in the order that the biblical texts were written, Mary of Nazareth situates biblical texts' treatment of Mary within first-century culture and examines changing theologies of Mary and the incarnation among the earliest generations of Christians

After the death of his brother, Warren Lewis lived at The Kilns in Oxford, edited his famous brother's letters, and did a little writing of his own. Then he got a letter from a stranger on the far side of the world. Over the years that followed, he and Blanche Biggs, a missionary in Papua New Guinea, shared a vibrant correspondence. These conversations encompassed their views on faith, their politics, their humor, the legacy of C. S. Lewis, and their own trials and longings.

The accidents are not a matter of chance. They are deliberate. As English gentleman William Kensley becomes aware of the danger at Rosenleigh, he pleads for truth from the only man he can trust—until that man is murdered. As the secrets unfold into scandal, William’s world is tipped into destitution—leaving him penniless and alone. His only comfort is in the constant love of Isabella Gresham, but even that has been threatened.

Frances Hodgson Burnett's favorite theme in her fiction was the reversal of fortune, and she herself knew extremes of poverty and wealth. Born in Manchester in 1849, she emigrated with her family to Tennessee because of the financial problems caused by the cotton famine. From a young age she published her stories to help the family make ends meet. Only after she married did she publish Little Lord Fauntleroy that shot her into literary stardom.