Maidens' Trip

Author: Emma Smith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
ISBN: 9780747598961
Category : Canals
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
Emma sets out with Nanette and Charity on a big adventure- three eighteen-year-old girls, freed from a conventional middle-class background, precipitated into the world of the boating fraternity. Never before had they met such people, the women with plaited hair and gold earrings, the men with choker scarves and darkly sunburnt faces, whole families existing for generation after generation on boats painted the brilliant colours of blue and scarlet, white and glossy black, living hard but undisturbed lives - until the arrival of these incomprehensible young creatures from another planet. Presented with the motor boat Venus and its butty boat, the Ariadne, the three girls embark on their maiden trip. They learn how to handle a pair of seventy-two foot-long canal boats, how to carry a cargo of steel north from London to Birmingham and, on the return journey south, coal from Coventry; how to navigate hazardous locks in the apparently unceasing rain; how to splice ropes, bail out bilge water, keep the engine ticking over and steer through tunnels. They live off kedgeree and fried bread and jam, adopt a kitten, lose their bicycles, laugh and quarrel and get progressively dirtier and tougher as the weeks go by. First published in 1948, Maidens' Trip is a classic memoir of the growth to maturity of three young women in the exceptional circumstances of Britain at war. Informative and fascinating, it breathes new life into England's canals and is vivacious, entertaining and poignant. A pure delight.

The Maidens

Author: Alex Michaelides
Publisher: Celadon Books
ISBN: 1250304474
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
**THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** "Alex Michaelides’s long-awaited next novel, 'The Maidens,' is finally here...the premise is enticing and the elements irresistible." —The New York Times "A deliciously dark, elegant, utterly compulsive read—with a twist that blew my mind. I loved this even more than I loved The Silent Patient and that's saying something!" —Lucy Foley, New York Times bestselling author of The Guest List From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Patient comes a spellbinding tale of psychological suspense, weaving together Greek mythology, murder, and obsession, that further cements “Michaelides as a major player in the field” (Publishers Weekly). Edward Fosca is a murderer. Of this Mariana is certain. But Fosca is untouchable. A handsome and charismatic Greek tragedy professor at Cambridge University, Fosca is adored by staff and students alike—particularly by the members of a secret society of female students known as The Maidens. Mariana Andros is a brilliant but troubled group therapist who becomes fixated on The Maidens when one member, a friend of Mariana’s niece Zoe, is found murdered in Cambridge. Mariana, who was once herself a student at the university, quickly suspects that behind the idyllic beauty of the spires and turrets, and beneath the ancient traditions, lies something sinister. And she becomes convinced that, despite his alibi, Edward Fosca is guilty of the murder. But why would the professor target one of his students? And why does he keep returning to the rites of Persephone, the maiden, and her journey to the underworld? When another body is found, Mariana’s obsession with proving Fosca’s guilt spirals out of control, threatening to destroy her credibility as well as her closest relationships. But Mariana is determined to stop this killer, even if it costs her everything—including her own life.

Enchanted Maidens

Author: James M. Taggart
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069122692X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
Spanish villagers tell many folktales that describe in metaphorical language the struggles of young men and women as they emerge from their parental families and join in love. In this book James Taggart presents dozens of orally transmitted tales, including "Snow White," "Cinderella," "Beauty and the Beast," "Blancaflor," and dragonslayer stories, collected from seven villages in the region of CNBceres, and analyzes the differences in male and female approaches to telling them. His study shows how men and women use the tales to grapple with some of the contradictions found in gender relations in their culture, which conditions men to be sexually assertive and to marry virgins and which teaches women to fear the men who court them. Taggart interprets the male-female dialogue voiced through storytelling by linking the content of specific tales to the life experiences and gender of the storyteller. Men and women, he finds, carry out an exchange of ideas by retelling the same stories and altering the plots and characters to express their respective views of courtship. This indirect narrative dialogue conveys an understanding of the opposite sex and establishes a common model of marriage that permits men and women to overcome their fear of each other and bond in heterosexual love.

The Flight of the Maidens

Author: Jane Gardam
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609454065
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
The Whitbread Award–winning author of the Old Filth trilogy captures a moment in time for three young women on the cusp of adulthood. Yorkshire, 1946. The end of the war has changed the world again, and, emboldened by this new dawning, Hetty Fallows, Una Vane, and Lieselotte Klein seize the opportunities with enthusiasm. Hetty, desperate to escape the grasp of her critical mother, books a solo holiday to the Lake District under the pretext of completing her Oxford summer coursework. Una, the daughter of a disconcertingly cheery hairdresser, entertains a romantically inclined young man from the wrong side of the tracks and the left-side of politics. Meanwhile, Lieselotte, the mysterious Jewish refugee from Germany, leaves the Quaker family who had rescued her, to test herself in London. Although strikingly different from one another, these young women share the common goal of adventure and release from their middle-class surroundings through romance and education. “Gardam’s lean, fast-paced prose is at turns hugely funny and deeply moving. . . . [Her] characters are acutely and compassionately observed.” —Atlantic Monthly “Quirky, enchanting . . . with lively, laugh-out loud elan.” —The Baltimore Sun “Splendid . . . Gardam’s style is perfect.” —The New York Times Book Review “With winning charm and wit . . . Gardam frames her story in dozens of crisp, brief scenes featuring deliciously dizzy conversation.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Ebullient, humorous, and wise, this is a novel to savor.” —Booklist “The portrait of postwar England as conventions crumble and the country is rebuilt is terrific.” —Publishers Weekly

The British Industrial Canal

Author: Jodie Matthews
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1837720045
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
Thousands of literary, popular, non-fiction and archival texts since the eighteenth century document the human experience of the British industrial canal. This book traces networks of literary canal texts across four centuries to understand our relationships with water, with place, and with the past. In our era of climate crisis, this reading calls for a rethinking of the waterways of literature not simply as an antique transport system, but as a coal-fired energy system with implications for the present. This book demonstrates how waterways literature has always been profoundly interested in the things we dig out of the ground, and the uses to which they are put. The industrial canal never just connected parts of Britain: via its literature we read the ways in which we are in touch with previous centuries and epochs, how canals linked inland Britain to Empire, how they connected forms of labour, and people to water.

A sense of place

Author: Lez Cooke
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526129825
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
This pioneering study examines regional British television drama from its beginnings on the BBC and ITV in the 1950s to the arrival of Channel Four in 1982. It discusses the ways in which regionalism, regional culture and regional identity have been defined, outlines the history of regional broadcasting in the UK, and includes two detailed case studies – of Granada Television and BBC English Regions Drama – representing contrasting examples of regional television drama during what is often described as the ‘golden age’ of British television. The conclusion brings the study up to date by discussing recent developments in regional drama production, and by considering future possibilities. Written in a scholarly but accessible style, the book uncovers a forgotten history of British television drama that will be of interest to lecturers and students of media and cultural studies, as well as the general reader with an interest in the history of British television.

The Far Cry

Author: Emma Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Girls
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
English girl's father takes her to India where she lives with her half-sister on a tea plantation.

The Great Western Beach

Author: Emma Smith
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408840197
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
______________ 'Emma Smith has written a book that should - and I hope does - endure as a classic among memoirs of childhood. I savoured every page' - Miranda Seymour, Evening Standard 'A wonderful book, full of unexpected effects, and I suspect that it will become a classic of the genre ... so sincerely compassionate that I honestly can't read it without weeping' - Lynne Truss, Sunday Times 'Evocative, witty and profoundly moving' - Daily Telegraph 'Deserves to become an overnight classic and to find a home at holiday cottage bedsides from St. Ives to Great Yarmouth' - Patrick Gale, author of Notes on an Exhibition ______________ The Great Western Beach is Emma Smith's wonderfully atmospheric memoir of a 1920s childhood in Newquay, Cornwall. She recalls the rocks, the sea, the beaches, the picnics, the teas and pasties, the bracing walks, the tennis tournaments and bathing parties, the curious residents and fascinating holiday-makers - relishing every glorious, salty detail. But above all this is a portrait of a family from the astonishingly clear-eyed perspective of a nine-year-old girl: her furious, frustrated father, perpetually on his way to becoming a world famous artist but suffering the indignity of being a lowly bank clerk; her beautiful, unperceptive mother, made for better things perhaps but at least, with three fiancés killed in the Great War, married with children at last; the twins, fearless, defiant Pam and sickly, bewildered Jim, for whom life is always an uphill climb, and baby Harvey, brought on the same winds of change that mean that life, with all its complication and wonder, cannot stay still and the Cornish playground of Emma's childhood will one day be lost forever.

Home Stories

Author: Gebroeders Grimm
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Book Description

The Maiden's Tale

Author: Margaret Frazer
Publisher: Dream Machine Productions
ISBN: 0425164071
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
A WEB OF LIES, INTRIGUE... AND ROMANCE It is an hour of desperate need for St. Frideswide's. Thrust into financial ruin by the incompetence and corruption of their former prioress, the nuns have become trapped under the thumb of Abbott Gilberd as he pries into every possible corner of the priory's life. In an effort to escape their desperate straits, Dame Frevisse is forced to journey to London in order to seek both a new prioress and financial aid for her beleaguered sisters. Once there, she turns to her wealthy cousin Alice, lady wife of the influential earl of Suffolk. But with a new Parliament warming to its arguments, Frevisse discovers that Alice's need may be even greater than her own. Caught between the powerful Gloucester, the machiavellian Bishop Beaufort, and the darkly handsome Duke of Orleans, Alice is torn by the broken loyalties of those she loves the most. Before she can unravel the twisted turns of romance and deception, Frevisse herself is caught up in the intrigue, carrying secret messages which will determine England's future. But the mystery deepens when one of the other messengers is killed, and Frevisse must solve the murder in order to save not only herself, but Alice's immortal soul. PRAISE FOR THE MAIDEN'S TALE “Frazer’s books will be among those I read as soon as I see them…” – Houston Facts “Frazer successfully captures the essence of 15th century England – the sights, smells, and sounds fill the pages, drawing us in as we become immersed in the language, manners, and customs of a far off time and place.” – Rendezvous “It’s a fine time to introduce yourself to this smart and sensible nun… Weaves a budding romance and a grand, unrequited passion with a bold and dangerous plot… A historical tale that teems with period detail. Great fun for all lovers of history with their mystery!” – Alfred Hitchcock Magazine PRAISE FOR THE SISTER FREVISSE MEDIEVAL MYSTERY SERIES "Dame Frevisse, the pious and perceptive nun gives focus to this sober series... [Frazer] shows a meticulous detail that speaks of trustworthy scholarship and a sympathetic imagination." - New York Times Book Review "Frazer is writing one of the most consistently excellent historical series in print today." - Murder Ink "Frazer uses her extensive knowledge of the period to create an unusual plot ... appealing characters and crisp writing." - Los Angeles Times "Within the graceful prose rhythms that have garnered her two Edgar nominations, Frazer's tale of 15th-century nun Dame Frevisse transports the reader to a medieval England made vivid and a world of emotions as familiar then as now." - Publisher's Weekly