Katherine Hilbery, torn between past and present, is a figure reflecting Woolf's own struggle with history. Both have illustrious literary ancestors: in Katherine's case, her poet grandfather, and in Woolf's, her father Leslie Stephen, writer, philosopher, and editor. Both desire to break away from the demands of the previous generation without disowning it altogether. Katherine must decide whether or not she loves the iconoclastic Ralph Denham; Woolf seeks a way of experimenting with the ...

Waste is a key category for understanding cultural value. It is not just the 'bad stuff' we dispose of; it is material we constantly struggle to redeem. Cultures seem to spend as much energy reclassifying negativity as they do on establishing the negative itself. The huge tertiary sector devoted to waste management converts garbage into money, while ecological movements continue to stress human values and 'the natural.' But the problems waste poses are never simply economic or environmenta...

Jacob's Room Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, who is both representative and victim of the social values which led Edwardian society into war. Jacob's life is traced from the time he is a small boy playing on the beach, through his years inCambridge, then in artistic London, and finally making a trip to Greece, but this is no orthodox Bildungsroman. Jacob is presented in glimpses, in fragments, as Woolf break...

Women in Love is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow, and follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an industrialist. Lawrence contrasts this pair with the love that develops between Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, an alienated intellectual who articulates many opinions associated with the author. The emotional r...

When Buddy Pancake and his buddies stumble across the Wish List website, they jokingly post their "impossible" wishes. Imagine their surprise when the wishes start coming true! But Buddy and his pals neglected to read the fine print and now must pay the price for the wishes they've been granted. Wish List is a compelling, nail-biting, laugh-out-loud thriller.

The third published novel of D.H. Lawrence, taken by many to be his earliest masterpiece, tells the story of Paul Morel, a young man and a budding artist. Generally, it is not only considered as an evocative portrayal of working-class life in a mining community, but also an intense study of family, class and early sexual relationships.

Virginia Woolf's Flush: A Biography is a playful yet incisive experiment in biographical form, recounting the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel while quietly reimagining Victorian literary culture from an oblique, nonhuman perspective. Blending mock-heroic wit, lyrical impressionism, and social satire, Woolf transforms the conventions of biography into a meditation on class, gender, sensory experience, and domestic confinement. The book belongs to her most inventive 1930s...

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning." James Joyce's supremely innovative fictional autobiography is also, in the apt phrase of the biographer Richard Ellmann, nothing less than "the gestation of a soul." For as he describes t...

Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in the countryside in Bourton and makes her wonder about her choice of husband...

First published in 1908, E. M. Forster’s “A Room with a View” is the story of a young English middle-class girl named Lucy Honeychurch. As the novel opens we find Lucy touring Italy with her overbearing older cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett. The two are upset over the views from their rooms. Having been promised views that overlook the river Arno, the two instead receive views of the courtyard. Their complaints are overheard by Mr. Emerson, who offers to swap rooms with them, citi...