Bøker utgitt av Michael Walmer

In 1909, ten years had elapsed since Max Beerbohm's last volume of essays. In the time which had passed, his style had evolved to become a little more elegiac, a little less over-consciously clever. Yet Again gave full voice to his new mode, moulded by constant journalism into a superb clear flow. Still present are trenchantly funny criticism of banality, gorgeous erudition, countered expectations and, most of all, delicious irony. In ¿Seeing People Off we are asked to examine the terrible truth behind awkward goodbyes; in A Club in Ruins the strange and lugubrious magnetism of dying buildings is surveyed; in Ichabod¿ the author shamefacedly asks himself why he should mind that all the labels have been cleaned from his luggage; in The House of Commons Manner he bemoans the surprising lack of skill in speaking of the august members of that house; and in Dulcedo Judiciorum a full account is rendered of the superiority of the entertainment provided by the law courts over that of the theatre. Alongside seventeen other brilliant essays, there is here also a special section of nine imaginative depictions inspired by famous artworks.

Edith and Bruce Ottley could not be called idyllically married. But a form of love persists between them, and their two precocious young children, Archie and Dilly, provide a further bond.Bruce's latest enthusiasms in their social circle are the Mitchells, whose parties are slightly risque and enormous fun, attracting all comers except the most staid. There the Ottleys meet Aylmer Ross, a handsome widowed barrister. Edith and he are drawn together irresistibly. But whilst Aylmer would like to take things further, Edith is loyal to Bruce. Their friendship, almost immediately quite intense, suffers onrushes and reverses as they grow to understand one another's limits.Then one day in Kensington Gardens Edith's world of loyalty is torn apart. She sees a couple clearly in love, hand in hand, sitting in a secluded seat. On closer examination she can't believe her eyes - one of them is Bruce! And the other is Miss Townsend, Archie and Dilly's governess! Will this deceit be enough to sway Edith and send her into Aylmer's willing embrace? What must she do ensure that everything turns out as it should?In Tenterhooks, her fourth novel, Ada Leverson rehearsed quite closely details of her own life. The decision of her husband Ernest to leave her and emigrate to Canada had been a major wrench. Exactly how nearly the plot follows reality is not known for certain but, with dash and sureness, the author delineates a sensitive and principled woman's responses to adversity, super-imposing upon them the wit and gaiety for which she was so renowned, creating a moving and entertaining portrait of a crisis in a marriage. The second of the three Ottleys novels,Tenterhooks was first published in 1912.

The neat ship Grosvenor is fully laden and crewed, and slowly traversing the English Channel, ready to leave on a trading journey to the other side of the Atlantic. Edward Royle has joined as second mate, new to the ship. As they make headway there are rumblings among the crew. Their provisions are rotten: damp, weevilled biscuit and stinking meat.The Grosvenor's firebrand captain and his tough American first mate won't stand for any interruption to the journey. They falsely indicate to the men that they will stop somewhere en route to take on new provisions. Royle is incensed on the men's behalf. The four survivors of a mid-Atlantic wreck are added to the ship's company at great risk, against the wishes of the mercenary captain, who would have left them to die. One of them, the capable Mary Robertson, quickly gains Royle's admiration.Things rapidly reach boiling point back on the Grosvenor. The mutiny is swift; Royle is forcibly enjoined to run the ship. Most of the crew are desperate to avoid the inevitable punishment - Royle gets wind of their plan to leave him, Mary and her father, the loyal boatswain and the cowardly steward to die in the deliberately holed ship once Royle has guided them near to land at Bermuda. His growing feelings for Mary further invigorate his determination to survive. The scene is set for a great trial against seemingly insurmountable odds.......W. Clark Russell's The Wreck of the 'Grosvenor' was the most successful novel of mutiny of the Victorian era. His sensitive depiction of the moods of both the sea and the skies, and the technical skill which only a seasoned seafarer could bring to the tale, make for a stirring and realistic spectacle. This moving novel became Russell's signature work.

Roderick Random's story is a classic rambunctious tale of rags and riches, set in the mid-eighteenth century.Roderick's father goes mad soon after he is born, in grief at his beloved wife's death. Roderick is cast into life as a virtual orphan, tumbles through a wild time at school, and ends up, on leaving, escaping to the heaving metropolis of London. There he encounters, with his best friend Strap, characters of a huge variety; card-sharpers, fallen women, bumbling doctors and malicious quacks, and very dubious gentlemen-about-town. He finally goes to sea after an inordinate waiting period spent hazarding the interminable bureaucracy of trying to get a place as a ship's medic. His fortunes rise and fall it seems on the spin of a coin, diving into indigence after being raised to the heights of elegance, time and again. His luck with women is similarly strange-starred and various, until one day he meets the lovely Narcissa Topehall and his heart is given forever.In splendidly picaresque scenes Smollett's story ranges from tattered London to the high social intensities of Bath society, to France and the soldier's life, out to sea and the West Indies and South America, roiling with grotesque humour and biting satire. With the support of a few good friends and despite the resistance of a goodl;y number of enemies, Roderick's fortunes are tested, luck and fate rolling the dice as to his chances, forging a scapegrace hero fit for his times.

Dormer is an old house with Elizabethan origins, much added to. It sits, very isolated, in a cup of the Shropshire hills, surrounded by forest. The Darke family have lived there for centuries. Solomon Darke is a squire farmer who tends to unthinking conservatism; his wife Rachel is harsh, fierce and uncompromising. They have four children - the eldest is the sensitive and original Amber, who feels, at thirty, that life has passed her by. Her brothers Jasper and Peter are more strong-willed - Jasper questions all around him in a determined but romantic way, while Peter has no time for any fuss and forcefully seeks simple pleasures. Their younger sister Ruby is biddable, nä¿¿ve and full of laughter. Rachel Darke's ancient mother lives with them, a harridan remnant in ringlets and flounces, dominating this already intense family with savage outbursts and calculating glances. Completing the family is Catherine, a young relative of Rachel and her mother, whose icy beauty has entrapped Jasper, and whose cold passions equal in power the heat of the Darkes'. A complex web of personal desires and long held antipathies becomes activated in the first instance by Jasper's return home, having been expelled from college for his rejection of religion. As hoped-for alliances collapse, dubious loves flower, well-laid plans go awry, and thwarted yearnings erupt into flame, this singular family and all around them are drawn into a seeming vortex which threatens to carry all with it to destruction. Mary Webb's personality shared a great deal with that of Emily Brontë, in terms not only of her love of nature and its kindling power, but also of her openness to the fullness of ardency. In this extraordinary third novel she delved this self profoundly, also introducing, in a way she hadn't before, leavening humour and cool analysis of character to balance this modern gothic vehemence. The House in Dormer Forest is heady and fascinating, risking a great deal and triumphing uniquely.

It is the late 1920s, and beautiful young Eve Wentworth is in a sticky situation. Both Harold and Hubert have asked her to marry them, and her inability to decide on either of them speaks volumes.Then Hugh Erskine, her sister Serena's husband, receives a letter from Jeremy Vaughan, a young family friend. He invites all three of them to join him on a tour of the Nile, sailing on a traditional dahabeah, but with all the mod cons of course. It seems the perfect solution to Eve's dilemma, and a delightful escape into the bargain.But things turn out to be not quite so simple. Eve has always liked Jeremy; she's known him since she was a little girl and he a slightly older boy. Soaking up all his knowledge of ancient Egypt, and enormously moved by the exotic beauty of an extraordinary and powerful landscape, slowly she registers that her feelings toward him are changing. To her chagrin, though, she can't help noticing that Jeremy seems very taken with Isobel Page, a wealthy young American they meet along the way.With delicately witty dialogue and amusing situations, Stella Tennyson Jesse takes us on an entertaining tour, not only of these tentatively perched emotions, but also of the magnificent and romantic remains of one of the world's great civilisations. Eve in Egypt is the sparklingly satisfying answer to a fascinating question: can one turn a travelogue into a beguiling novel? Jesse proves that one can, brilliantly.

In two brilliant collections of stories, Reginald (1904) and Reginald in Russia (1910), which spanned the Edwardian period, Saki made his name as the predominant wit of the emergent twentieth century. As the new Georgian age dawned, his star was at its height:"..Sylvia, notwithstanding her name, was accustomed to nothing much more sylvan than "leafy Kensington." She looked on the country as something excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt to become troublesome if you encouraged it overmuch...""...I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English...""...You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed."In this volume, first published in 1911, he introduced a new titular character, albeit with a huge resemblance to both Reginald and himself. Clovis Sangrail is unsurprisable, louche in conversation, thoroughly determined to avoid the banal. In this magnificent collection, he observes the ludicrous with an unswerving eye, and undermines it with rapier-like skill, while gleefully and covertly turning all to his advantage. Saki had announced himself as the brief Edwardian flame burnt itself out; with the brilliance of this volume he made it plain that he had no intention of fading away.

Gösta Berling is a failed parson in nineteenth century rural Sweden, too fond of pleasure and the drink, torn by conflicting aims -- the charm and deceit, love and laziness in him fighting for supremacy. He teams together with a group of sometimes dissolute, often well-meaning freemen of their district to evict the seemingly mad owner of a great rambling house at the centre of its own semi-feudal estate, Ekeby. This group call themselves the cavaliers.In her telling of what happens next, Lagerlöf creates a strange fusion between the realism of authors like Ibsen and Strindberg and the mythic force of the Scandinavian sagas. Gösta's great loves, his enemies, those to whom he teaches lessons about life, either intentionally or accidentally, and others whose stories he has only a small part in, all start up from the page into a strange, elemental clarity, creating a sprawling mosaic of romance and realism.This first novel from the deeply original mind of the 1909 Nobel Prize winner weaves a balance between everyday rural reality and underlying dreams and fable to create a patchwork of extraordinary complexity and looming fascination, in which the reader can detect the author's passion for the stories of her country, and her sceptical warmth for the troubled human spirit.

When republican revolution comes to the kingdom of Illyria, King Christian and Queen Frederique, their young son Zara, and a small retinue of the abandoned court escape to Paris. They set up home there in much reduced, but still elegant, circumstances. Christian is a devotee of pleasure, while Frederique is staunch in her desire to maintain not only royal standards, but their effort to regain their throne. Christian descends into Paris' pleasure pits and seeks only passing joys, while Frederique determinedly schemes for restoration. Only now will the real import of their vividly contrasting personalities come into focus. Trapped in the arms of a deceptive mistress, badly in debt, and imperfectly committed, Christian is asked to lead a counter-revolution - with disastrous results. With all hope of restoration gone, can their marriage survive? Alphonse Daudet masterfully charts this course to disaster with lyric colour, bitter melancholy, and an undertow of passion. This fascinating exposure of the regal and the rotten was first published in 1879.

Valentia and Romer Wyburn have what seems to be a typical Edwardian marriage. Beautiful Valentia has found the handsome, solid and silently devoted Romer a little duller than she expected, and her high spirits have sought out a distant cousin, the elegant but poor artist Harry de Freyne, whose worldly attitude of fun suits her admirably. They are carrying on what they hope is a discreet affair. Meanwhile, Valentia's younger sister Daphne is being pursued by a wealthy American friend of Harry, Matthew Van Buren, who worships women in a respectful way that is typically transatlantic. Harry finds his attitude needless, being much more selfish and practical in his aims where the fair sex are concerned. Unfortunately for Van Buren, Daphne is equally unimpressed; her heart is already captivated by Cyril Foster, a 'baby Guardsman' whose lack of wealth is a problem, but who returns Daphne's liking, to the concern of those who want to see her set up comfortably in life. Will Valentia and Harry manage to get away with their affair? What will happen if Harry's meagre artistic income finally peters out entirely? Will he marry the illimitably-moneyed Miss Walmer, who, like almost all women, finds his easy charm extraordinarily attractive, but whose healthy love of hockey and florid complexion do not appeal to him in the least? Will the Wyburns' friend, the hugely successful playwright Hereford Vaughan, be able to help Valentia see what she is risking? The affair sizzles and the two grow ever more emboldened, until an overheard conversation brings everything to a head; the limit is reached. Surprisingly, it is quiet Romer Wyburn himself who provides a very unexpected answer. This delightfully witty comedy with touches of deeper drama was Ada Leverson's third novel; it was first published in 1911.

"Damn Katherine! Why can't I be the only woman who knows how to write?" Virginia Woolf Katherine Mansfield was, most of all, a passionate spirit. Her poems are sometimes traditional, sometimes outbursts of emotion, sometimes experiments akin to prose poems. In all she manages a strange alchemy; ordinary words are somehow transformed into powerful arrows of meaning. Into the world you sent her, mother, Fashioned her body of coral and foam, Combed a wave in her hair's warm smother, And drove her away from home. In the dark of the night she crept to the town And under a doorway she laid her down, This little blue child in the foam-fringed gown. And never a sister and never a brother To hear her call, to answer her cry. Her face shone out from her hair's warm smother Like a moonkin up in the sky. She sold her corals; she sold her foam; Her rainbow heart like a singing shell Broke in her body: she crept back home. Peace, go back to the world, my daughter, Daughter, go back to the darkling land; There is nothing here but sad sea water, And a handful of sifting sand. The Sea-Child 1911 These 69 poems were collected together and published in 1923, just after Katherine Mansfield's death. Many had never been published before; others only in magazines. John Middleton Murry explains in his introductory note that they are effusions of what he calls her 'exquisite spirit, ' the uniqueness of which guarantees Mansfield her permanent place in twentieth century literature.

Ouida had one of the most powerful radical conservative voices of the late nineteenth century. Known primarily as a colourful and eccentric novelist, she embodied in her forthright essays a much more piercing energy and single-minded verve. The majority of these ten essays were first published in the early 1890s in the pages of the Pall Mall Magazine, the Fortnightly Review and the North American Review, journals of serious cultural and political debate where she rubbed shoulders with commentators of all persuasions. Ouida's decidedly original point of view added fire to their bloodstreams. All manner of subjects interested her, whether it be what she saw as the phenomenal vulgarity and dangerous venality of modern society in The Sins of Society, Conscription and O Beati Insipientes!, or the nature-hating disasters of modern outdoor design and town planning in Gardens and The Passing of Philomel, or, most searchingly, the grotesque stupidities of the modern political and cultural life of her beloved adopted Italy in four passionate cries of outrage included here. Perhaps this book's most amused and cool-headed piece, The Failure of Christianity, strips away the humbug of organised 'religion' and demolishes its time-serving with panache. In all of these pieces Ouida takes no prisoners. Utterly independent in outlook, she is more than happy to heap malediction upon the heads of peasant and royal alike, to praise unfashionable viewpoints, and to strike a blow, as she saw it, for those few enlightened souls who were in love with freedom, inspired by history, architecture and art, enthused by nature and empathetic toward animals. For Ouida, these qualities of higher sensitivity were definitive of civilisation in its true sense, and horrendously lacking in late nineteenth century Europe. One can only wonder with a shiver what she would have made of our twenty-first century life...

Mary Webb was passionately devoted to revealing nature in all of its expressions and forms. She was diagnosed with Graves' disease at the age of 20, and in times of recovery she early noticed that her love of nature sped her healing. She also, in these sensitive times of contemplation and struggle, saw the natural world more tenderly and luminously; the urgencies of life were clearer. The Spring of Joy collects together a group of exquisite essays of appreciation, written with the idea of succouring 'the weary and wounded in the battle of life.' They are an extraordinary record of a woman's empathy, not only for the beauty, colour, form, delicacy and majesty of the natural world, but also for her fellow human beings who suffer.

As the war drew to a close, its heavy toll weighed mightily on Stella Benson's heart. Any means of escape was viable, as long as it took her truth with it. Living Alone, the most fantastical and delightfully wayward of her first three novels, was her exhausted mind's perfect project for the times. In the dark days of 1918, Sarah Brown, who is a little tired and dispirited, and also not completely well, is minding her own business, doing what she ought in helping the poor in her rundown part of London. She is the much put-upon dogsbody of a small committee designed to assist needy cases. At the latest dull meeting with Mrs Meta Ford, Lady Arabel Higgins and the Mayor there is an extraordinary interruption as a youngish woman storms into the room and hides under the table. It eventuates that she is being chased for the capital crime of stealing a bun from a baker's shop! This crazy meeting is a critical one in Sarah's life. The young woman, whose name is never quite clear, turns out to be something quite unexpected - a witch. Sarah forms a bond with her, fascinated by this explosion of magic in a desperately hurt and drab world. As she meets the witch's outré associates and talks the kind of wildly honest sense with her that has seemed missing for so long, she finds herself on adventures involving forbidden sandwiches, soldiers who are wizards, meeting ghosts in an air raid shelter, and cloudfights with an evil German witch, all punctuated with her witch's little paper packets of magic, whose effects tend to turn dreary people into fascinating beings. This intriguing novel of great tenderness and smart wit also betrays the sense of enervated tension that was prevalent in Britain after five long years of horror. It is a plaintive cry for peace, beauty and humanity in a world made brutal. Living Alone was first published in 1919.

Odette d'Antrevernes, a sheltered and enthusiastic young girl, lives with her widowed mother, her Creole nurse and their aged butler in an old grey chateau by the Loire. She receives regular visits from the old Curé of Bois-Fleuri, who tells her thrilling stories of Bernadette and her vision of the Holy Virgin in the mountains. One day Odette decides that she too must seek the Holy Virgin. With the house deadly quiet in the middle of the night, she steals secretly out into the garden, but events do not run as she expects. By morning, what has happened there will have changed her life forever...

In the reign of Cleopatra, an insignificant young man is in love. Meïamoun is captivated by his beloved, but she seems unattainable. There is a reason why the handsome young fellow is barred from his quest. The one he wants is his queen. He stands on the outskirts of great ceremonies just to catch a glimpse of her. He dreams of her charms and fascinations constantly. One night, having followed her royal cangia along the Nile to a palace at the waters' edge, his obsession overtakes him - through an open window he fires an arrow with a note attached which bears the simple words "I love you." Will Cleopatra acknowledge him? What further feats of daring must he undertake to get near her? If he does, what could possibly happen? In this high-stakes undertaking, one thing is for sure - he will risk his life... One of Cleopatra's Nights was first published with other novellas in a volume entitled A Tear of the Devil in 1839.

In the early nineteenth century, Juliette Ruyter, a beautiful young Belgian, and her protector, the noble Spaniard Aleo Bustamante, have arrived in Venice just before carnival. The mystery of their union is not clear, until Bustamante mentions that the notorious Leone Leoni is in Venice with his wealthy playmates. At news of this Juliette starts with shock, and her trembling reaction brings their troubles to the fore. Bustamante finally persuades her to tell him the whole story of her progress of ruin and degradation at the hands of one of the most infamous and charming scoundrels of his time. Will telling the story finally expiate Juliette's unhealthy obsession? Can she really evade a relationship that sometimes seems to her ordained by God, sometimes cursed by the Devil? This astonishing novel tells of innocence trapped by debauchery in a dazzling round of intrigue, impersonation and emotional deception. It casts itself across Europe in an intricate web of rumour and aspersion, at the centre of which lies the key question: exactly how genuine is Leoni's vaunted passion for Juliette? Leone Leoni was first published in 1835.

Letters to the Sphinx contains five main sections: the first is a typically characterful, cantankerous and yet appreciative essay of explanation by Oscar Wilde's literary executor and close friend, Robert Ross. Then follow three major essays of reminiscence by the Sphinx herself, the book's compiler, Ada Leverson, also a dear friend of Wilde: The Importance of Being Oscar gives an iconically witty introduction to how Wilde operated and who he was; The Last First Night gives an elegiac impression of the atmosphere Wilde generated at the zenith of his career; and, finally, Afterwards is a sombrely quiet reflection on Wilde's trials and imprisonment, his troubles, as he called them. Finally it becomes Wilde's turn to speak. In thirty letters, letter-excerpts and telegrams his nature is impressed upon us. From his highest manner which surprisingly lacked stiffness, and in his lowest spirits which were plainly humble, his facility with and mastery of words and epigram are clearly evident, providing a compelling portrait of a personality which was, as Ross claims, 'unique in English literature'. This slender volume was originally published as a limited edition in 1930 and has remained unavailable, except in the rare book market, ever since.

Max Beerbohm presents in More a collection of twenty brilliantly amusing essays. In a wide-ranging tour through both the inspiring and the ridiculous in English fin de siecle society, Beerbohm casts a veiled critical drubbing here, and a wistful though sprightly appreciation there, thoroughly entertaining us and accurately spearing his victims. Some of his most noted work appeared in this second little volume when it was first published in 1899. In "Punch" he asks us if the magazine's terrible dullness is not our own fault; in An Infamous Brigade the question is revolved as to whether the fire engine is not an infernal machine designed to dampen our pleasure; in The Blight on the Music Halls we must critically consider the relative merits of vulgarity and refinement; in Ouida the famed enthusiastic author's wild colour and occasional infelicities are justly celebrated; in Arise, Sir - -! the decorations offered to literary time-servers are the saucy target; in A Cloud of Pinafores the cult of childlike simplicity tempts the author's tongue, and sharpens its point... With razor-edged wit and a perfect ear for irony, Max Beerbohm delivers us in More twenty further reasons to call him the finest, and funniest, essayist of his era.

'The best of all Montgomery's poems: in idea the most original, in execution the most powerful...' Blackwood's Magazine South Australia's exquisite natural gem, Kangaroo Island, has been inspiring locals for well over a century, and is now beginning to develop a formidable international reputation. It is rarely known, however, that its earliest mention in the annals of Matthew Flinders' voyages published two centuries ago, in 1814, sowed a seed of inspiration for one of the early nineteenth century's most popular poets. James Montgomery, acclaimed by Lord Byron as 'a man of considerable genius, ' had a successful career spanning several decades, and huge popularity with the British public. He fought for the era's noble causes in his verse, including most notably the abolition of slavery in The West Indies, and the improvement of the conditions of chimney-sweeps in The Climbing-Boys' Soliloquies. Popular also because he was a poet of great tenderness and openness of thought, he was interested in all of the new scientific discoveries of his times, its politics great and small, and in the beliefs that underpinned what he saw as the best of humanity. In 1827, as his career reached its zenith, he produced one last long poem, destined to be the crowning glory. Summoning up all the extraordinary energies of a reformer with all the vision of a poet, he embarked upon The Pelican Island. Presented to us by a kind of recording angel or spirit, it is a narrative of nature's incredible powers of creation and destruction, of wild seas and teeming scenes, as an island grows from nothing, is peopled by all manner of plants and creatures, is wiped out by a hurricane, and then reforms in a different shape. Inspired by Flinders' mention of the islets in what is now known as Pelican Lagoon on Kangaroo Island, he portrays his island becoming a home-place for pelicans, where they come to nest and bring up young, and also where they come back to die. Later, humans come to his island and the story changes, reflecting Montgomery's concerns about our power and brutishness, and also what he saw as our necessary enlightenment and resort to belief. In towering language and powerful phrasing, he creates a broodingly rhythmic and driving tour-de-force, marrying intensity of thought and colour with great philosophical scope and humanity.

Saki made his name at the beginning of the Edwardian period with bitingly witty stories and political sketches, inheriting in many ways Oscar Wilde's vacated crown. His early main character, Reginald, was very like himself - a dissector of flabby respectability with a hilariously savage tongue. The first collected volume of Reginald stories was published in 1904. As the period drew on, publishing in a broad array of journals and magazines, Saki's range widened, baring the full extent of his genius for all to see: "Reginald sat in a corner of the Princess' salon and tried to forgive the furniture, which started out with an obvious intention of being Louis Quinze, but relapsed at frequent intervals into Wilhelm II." "Mrs Crick had a long family, and was therefore licensed, in the eyes of her world, to have a short temper..." "Possessed of only moderate means, he was able to live comfortably within his income, and still more comfortably within those of various tolerantly disposed associates." "Vanessa began to arrive at the conclusion that a husband who added a roving disposition to a settled income was a mixed blessing. It was one thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its virtue when one practised it in a tent." "There's always a chance that one of them might turn out depraved and vicious, and then you could disown him. I've heard of that being done." "But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school." Finally, in 1910, this book, the best of the stories of the intervening years, was pulled together, including one last Reginald story which gave this new volume its title, as well as some of the pieces on which the height of Saki's reputation still rests: the sensual, eerie gallows-delight of Gabriel-Ernest; the joyful late-shock nervous tension of The Reticence of Lady Anne, The Bag and The Mouse; and the worldly gleeful ghostliness of The Soul of Laploshka. Also included is the notable little 'playlet' A Baker's Dozen.

The publication of this book in 1893 marked the first time that a translation into English had occurred from modern Finnish literature. These four deeply contrasting pieces from the pen of Juhani Aho, one of the founding fathers of that new national consciousness, are remarkable in their combination of rustic settings and strange psychological subtlety. The title-piece is both harrowing and humorous. Squire Hellman is an angry fiend of a man, bellowing constantly at his wife and servants, as well as all local dignitaries, and whipping his horses in a frenzy if he gets frustrated. One day, at a taxation court, he impatiently lets loose one too many times! The bailiff and a local captain decide that it's time he paid for his social crimes, and devise a cunning way to force him to recant. The other three pieces are sketches of rural life, delineating with unusual intensity psychological situations where it is the characters' mindset which creates the drama: When Father Brought Home the Lamp about the coming of technology and the modern age; Pioneers about how heartbreakingly Finland's wilds were settled; and Loyal about young love and the resisting of temptation. Juhani Aho wrote many of these subtle and revealing shorter pieces, giving them a name and category of their own - splinters. This edition includes the original introduction by the translator, R. Nisbet Bain, which not only introduces the author, but also gives a fascinating summary of Finnish literature as it stood at the fin de siècle.

As the days of sail begin to give way to those of steam, Sir Mordaunt Brookes has built a boat. The Lady Maud is a gleaming thing, a schooner yacht, sumptuously fitted out with shining white decks and all the accessories a Victorian gentleman could require. All of this work of building has been for one purpose: a sea journey across the Atlantic, from Southampton all the way to the West Indies, to benefit the ailing health of his demanding and nervous wife, Lady Agnes. He has a small crew. He has a doctor, Norie, to administer to Agnes' needs. His beautiful young niece will also come along, to keep her company. But he has no-one outside the crew with any seafaring knowledge. Then he remembers Edmund Walton, a true friend and former sailor who has been away from the sea for ten years, who happily agrees to come on the journey, his heart hungering for life on the waves. Soon after leaving the Solent, they happen upon an adventure: a lost pleasure-boater in the English Channel needs their help to return to land. Walton wonders if this will set the tone for the rest of the trip, and also begins to detect, with his sharp sailor's eye, that all is not right with Purchase, the Lady Maud's captain. Has Sir Mordaunt selected wisely? Way out in the wild swells of the mid-Atlantic a very different challenge meets them. The Wanderer, a sailing ship, has been torn to shreds in a howling gale. All that is left is a slowly sinking hulk with four poor souls clinging onto it for dear life. With the seas pounding and danger at every turn, Walton and several of the crew risk their lives to rescue them. Have they now finally had their share of adventures? Will the rest of the journey leave them peacefully making headwind? Has Purchase made the right calculation of their position in this roaring weather? One night, Walton wakes up to a terrific grinding bump and is thrown into the corner of his cabin, the floor almost vertical. Now begins a yet more serious test; this elegant cruise has suddenly become a desperate struggle for survival... W. Clark Russell's evocative prose, laden with the colours and moods of the sea and sky, unfolds a tale of tragedy with seemingly effortless control; its lucid and realistic shades make for one of the Victorian era's finest novels of shipwreck.

"It is the second step of a very brilliant beginning.....You will be foolish if you miss this book." Punch "This book shows one thing very clearly, that Miss Benson is a force to be reckoned with." Pall Mall Gazette Stella Benson's subtle, beautiful and poignant second novel built upon the phenomenal success of her first, I Pose, which sported crazy wit and bright conceits. In the spring of 1916, we meet orphaned sister and brother Jay and Kew Martin in London. Jay (real name Jane Elizabeth) has run away from her strange, claustrophobic, interfering, well-heeled family to the simplicities of the 'Brown Borough' (otherwise Hackney), to live amongst its working-class people, to a job as a bus conductor, and to discover her own wild self. Kew is on recuperative leave from the War, and manages to find Jay in her humble new abode. She begs him to preserve her newfound freedom and not reveal her whereabouts to their family. But nothing can stop their former guardians, the eccentric writer Anonyma Martin and her husband, their dry cousin Gustus, from setting out to try to find her, using clues from Jay's letters. The problem is, Jay's letters have been fabricated from her extraordinary dream-filled imagination; she's set them on a wild goose-chase! Benson subtly reveals a lot more of her personal philosophy in This is the End. She speaks in an enigmatic, haunting and deeply felt way about the power of dreams and fantasies. She also adds two other new ingredients - poignantly sad observation of life, love, and the world, and revelatory cries of pain about the savagery and horror of the War, at the very centre of whose appalling cost she was writing, right at the crucial juncture between Victorianism and Modernity. First published in 1917, This is the End has the magnificent wit and brightness of mind which established Benson's reputation for originality, and combines them with a fresh strength of emotion and poetic expression which make for one of the most unusual and moving novels set in the home front of the First World War.

Miss O'Brookomore became evasive. "I want you to repress yourself a little for a few days. Be more discreet." "Because ----" "Professor and Mrs. Cowsend have the rooms next ours..." "Buz! Let them!" "Also, the Arbanels are here on their honeymoon....You never saw such ghosts on their rambles." "Who is Mr. Arbanel?" "He's very blasé." Miss Collins clasped her hands. "I'd give almost anything to be blasé." Young Mabel Collins, naïvely wily-wise before her very tender years, daughter of a dreaded and dull Yorkshire estate, needs experience - needs to get out into the world. At her first soirée, she is introduced to the renowned eccentric biographer Geraldine O'Brookomore, who is just about to start out for Greece on the trail of her latest quarry, the romantic early traveller Catherine "Kitty" Kettler. It is decided that Mabel will be the perfect companion for her trip. Ronald Firbank's wildly accentuated style, brimful of strange exclamations and bursts of hilariously intense conversation, takes us with them as they move around the famous Greek landscape, meeting along the way many English and European expatriates with equally striking preoccupations and attitudes: "I heard the flowers scream as I picked them!" Mrs. Erso-Ennis was saying as she scattered a shower of blossoms upon the floor. Their whole escapade cannot help but be eventful: Across a vivid, a perfectly pirate sea, Salamis showed shimmering in the sun. Miss Arne held out arms towards it. "It's like a happy ending!" she breathed. There will be no such happy ending for their friend, the actress Miss Arne. Salamis' sea will be a witness to....what? An accident? A murder? Mabel, though, has something else on her mind: the dashing Count Pastorelli, disapproved of heartily by Geraldine, has been pursuing her... This, Firbank's second novel, with its hints of the Sapphic and the scandalous, was first published in 1916. The Glasgow Herald's reviewer said "Mr. Ronald Firbank's fiction bears a strong resemblance to the work of the Futurists in painting." He certainly was, in the oddness of his depiction and in his stripping-down of narrative and conversation to their bizarre bare bones, a master of the avant-garde well before his time. This edition includes an extra chapter, written much later in 1925.