Ebooks de literatura, página 11 de 78

Brat Farrar begins when a rootless young man is recruited by faded actor Alex Loding to impersonate Patrick Ashby, the long-missing heir to Latchetts, a South Country horse-breeding estate. Coached in family minutiae and stablecraft, Brat enters a household shadowed by Patricks presumed death and by the coolly ambitious twin, Simon. Teys prose is lucid and dryly witty, its suspense built from horsemanship, landscape, and exact social detail, marking a bridge from Golden Age puzzle to postwar psychological suspense. Josephine Tey - pen name of Scottish novelist and playwright Elizabeth MacKintosh (also Gordon Daviot) - brings a dramatists feel for role and rehearsal to questions of identity. Skeptical of formula series detection, she turns instead to motive, memory, and performance. Writing in 1949, she threads postwar unease about inheritance, class, and the fate of rural enterprise through a taut narrative whose credibility owes much to her theater experience and cool, economical style. Recommended to readers who prize character-driven crime fiction and understated tension. Admirers of Sayers or Allingham will relish its classic clarity, while fans of later psychological thrillers will recognize its anticipations. For anyone curious how a country-house mystery can become a study in belonging and truth, without relinquishing fair-play satisfactions, Brat Farrar is essential.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

Leave Her to Heaven is a chilling anatomy of possessive love that masquerades as romance. Novelist Richard Harland falls for dazzling Ellen Berent; their marriage moves from desert brightness to a secluded Maine lake where her devotion curdles into ruthless jealousy. Williams narrates the spiral with cool, lucid prose that inventories ordinary acts while intimating abyssal motives. The placid domestic frame becomes a theater of moral terror, locating the book within American domestic noir and midcentury psychological fiction, its elegant cruelty prefiguring later thrillers. Ben Ames Williams, a prolific storyteller forged in the high-circulation magazine world, brings journalistic clarity and inexorable pacing to this moral labyrinth. Rooted in New England landscapes and an interest in character under pressure, he transforms popular narrative craft into a study of will, desire, and the eras anxious hunger for control. For readers drawn to the exacting psychology of James M. Cain or Patricia Highsmithand for those who know the celebrated 1945 filmthis novel offers a darker, subtler reckoning. I recommend it to scholars and general readers alike: beautiful in design, merciless in insight, and unforgettable.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

In The Fixed Period, Trollope imagines the future republic of Britannula, where a reforming president, John Neverbend, enacts a law mandating compulsory retirement at sixty-seven and a year of sequestration before humane death at sixty-eight. Narrated by Neverbend in an earnest, self-justifying voice, the novel blends political debate, parliamentary procedure, and domestic comedy into a coolly ironical dystopia set in 1980. Its satire probes utilitarian calculations, the rhetoric of progress, colonial self-confidence, and the sentimental claims of friendship, culminating in a dramatic imperial intervention that tests the limits of technocratic governance and humane intention. Written late in Anthony Trollopes career, the book extends the concerns of a novelist famed for Barsetshire and parliamentary fiction into speculative terrain. A veteran civil servant and indefatigable traveler, Trollope knew colonial societies firsthand and observed debates on scientific administration, aging, and euthanasia; those experiences and his skepticism toward reductive utilitarianism shape the novels tonal mix of sympathy and scrutiny. Recommended to readers of Swift and Butler as well as early science fiction, The Fixed Period offers a concise, unsettling meditation on progress and pity, ideal for courses in Victorian studies, bioethics, political thought, and utopian-dystopian literature.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

Queen Hildegarde introduces a pampered city girl exiled to a plain New England farm, where she trades borrowed "royalty" for the nobility of work, loyalty, and neighborly duty. Richardss brisk, companionable prose blends comic episodes with keen observation of domestic labor, its gentle didacticism characteristic of late-nineteenth-century girls fiction. Episodic chapters form a moral apprenticeship, while local-color detailkitchen garden, quilting, village callsgrounds the conversion narrative. In the Alcottian tradition, queenship becomes character rather than pedigree. Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards, daughter of reformers Julia Ward Howe and Samuel Gridley Howe, wrote from a household steeped in service and letters. Living in Maine, she produced lively juvenile fiction and verse, and later won a Pulitzer for coauthoring her mothers biography. Her conviction that cheerful industry and community obligation refine the self animates Hildegardes arc; the rural setting distills rhythms she knew and respected. Recommended to readers who relish character-driven tales and historically grounded portraits of girlhood, Queen Hildegarde rewards with warmth, wit, and a clear moral intelligence. It will especially suit admirers of Alcott and Burnett, students of Gilded Age juvenile literature, and anyone curious how ordinary tasks teach extraordinary grace.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

Uncle Silas (1864) distills the Victorian sensation novel into a chilling study of inheritance, guardianship, and peril. Narrated retrospectively by teenage heiress Maud Ruthyn, it follows her removal to the decaying estate of Bartram-Haugh after her fathers death and the custody of the enigmatic Silas, long shadowed by a notorious locked-room scandal. Le Fanus slow-burn designgothic interiors, predatory visitors, and the grotesque Madame de la Rougierrebuilds mounting claustrophobia, while Swedenborgian undertones and legal constraints thicken the air. Blending domestic realism with uncanny romance, the book converses with Collins and refines a Brontean inheritance into intimate psychological terror. An Anglo-Irish master of the uncanny, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu edited the Dublin University Magazine and wrote from a clerical, Protestant milieu. Bereavement and semi-reclusive, nocturnal habits after his wifes death sharpened his inward gaze; the novel expands his earlier tale "A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess." Recommended to readers of Gothic and Victorian studies, Uncle Silas remains a taut, ethically probing thriller. Its supple first-person voice and rigorously patterned suspense reward close attention, offering one of the centurys most disquieting portraits of innocence endangered within the domestic sphere.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

Set between the Staffordshire Potteries and Paris, The Old Wives Tale traces the bifurcating lives of Constance and Sophia Baines from youthful shop assistants to old age, through marriage, commerce, flight, and loss. Bennetts spacious realism - precise in material detail, steady in pace, and quietly psychological - turns the ordinary into event. Moving from Bursleys drapery to the 1870-71 Siege of Paris, the novel makes time its protagonist. Within the Edwardian realist tradition and in dialogue with Balzac and Flaubert, it builds moral insight by accumulation. Born in Hanley in the heart of the Five Towns and later resident in Paris, Arnold Bennett fused provincial intimacy with cosmopolitan observation. Journalism disciplined his eye for process - how shops run, money moves, reputations harden. A Parisian glimpse of an aged woman, he said, sparked the inquiry into who she had been. Readers who value breadth of social vision and humane exactness will relish this novels patient artistry. It rewards admirers of Balzacian panorama and Trollopian society, and it offers a vital counterpoint to modernist caricatures of Bennett. A classic of English realism, it deepens with every return.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

Hide and Seek interweaves lost identity with a tender study of disability. At its center stands the deaf heroine, Madonna, adopted by the idealistic painter Valentine Blyth; their orbit spans the London studio and the traveling circus from which she was rescued, as a buried scandal surfaces. Collins blends domestic realism with investigative plotting and theatrical set pieces, moving from comic bustle to menace. An early 1850s work, it anticipates sensation fiction by using secrets, misrecognition, and social surveillance to interrogate Victorian norms. Collins, son of Royal Academician William Collins, writes with an eye trained by the gallery and the greenroom. His association with Dickens and Household Words sharpened his interest in urban margins, while humane curiosity about law, medicine, and pedagogy shapes the respectful portrayal of deafness and sign. Early in his career, he tests techniquesshifting focalization, documentary detail, ethical suspensethat he would later perfect in The Woman in White and The Moonstone. Readers of Victorian fiction, disability studies, and arts culture will find this novel richly rewarding. It offers narrative pleasure, historical insight, and a humane intelligence that still feels modern, making it an ideal introduction to Collins and a cornerstone of early sensation.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

Olivia in India is a sprightly epistolary novel in which a young Scottish traveler reports, with lucid wit and tact, on the textures of British Indiarailway journeys and hill-stations, verandah gossip and bazaar pageants, dust-storms and kindnesses. The letters accumulate into a novel of manners whose gentle satire never masks a steady moral curiosity. Written in the Edwardian twilight, it belongs beside light-hearted Raj narratives and travel fiction, mixing observational comedy with etched landscapes and an understated romance. Writing as O. Douglas, Anna BuchanScottish novelist and sister of John Buchanperfected a mode of domestic realism attentive to place, civility, and the small heroism of everyday life. Her Borders upbringing and preference for epistolary immediacy shape this early work: the letter-form legitimizes a female spectators intelligence while preserving reticence. Without polemic, she translates imperial encounters into scenes of manners, revealing how curiosity, homesickness, and moral poise inform Olivias gaze. This poised, companionable novel will reward readers interested in womens travel writing, Edwardian comedy, and humane portraits of the Raj. It is an inviting point of entry to O. Douglass oeuvre and a supple text for discussions of gendered spectatorship, social satire, and the uneasy comforts of home abroad.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

Rudin (1856) inaugurates Turgenevs gallery of the "superfluous man," portraying the eloquent yet ineffectual Dmitrii Rudin on a provincial estate. With limpid, economical prose, shaded dialogue, and lyrical landscapes, Turgenev stages the clash between idealism and action, reason and feeling. Salon debates, a restrained love plot, and a quietly devastating farewell distill the intellectual atmosphere of the 1840s, when Westernizing ideas unsettled gentry routines. Classical design and psychological tact mark a mature, understated realism. Ivan Sergeevich Turgeneveducated in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlincombined European intellectual training with intimate knowledge of gentry estates and serfdom. Encounters with reformist circles and periods of enforced residence in the country honed his portrait of the "men of the forties," brilliant talkers disabled by circumstance and temperament. Rudin is often read as a composite of that cohort, sometimes linked to figures like Bakunin or Granovsky, filtered through Turgenevs humane skepticism. Readers of nineteenthcentury realism and Russian intellectual history will find in Rudin a compact, lucid meditation on promise and failure. It rewards close reading and invites debate about charisma, responsibility, and the costs of ideas.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

Waverly (1814) virtually inaugurates the historical novel, entwining Edwards education with the Jacobite Rising of 1745. Stationed in Scotland, the ingenuous officer drifts from Hanoverian loyalty toward Fergus and Flora Mac-Ivor, counterpoised by Rose Bradwardine and her whimsical Baron. Scotts digressive, ironic narrator layers dialect, humor, and antiquarian detail across settings from Tully-Veolan to Prestonpans, balancing romance with skeptical realism to meditate on loyalty, modernization, and the forging of British identity. Scottlawyer, ballad-collector, and Sheriff-Deputemarried Enlightenment training to Tory sympathy for order and tradition. Years of legal practice and fieldwork among Borders and Highlands, plus conversations with Jacobite descendants, furnished the novels documentary texture. Writing anonymously, he sought to reconcile Scotlands fractured past with a commercial, imperial present and to preserve vanishing customs without sentimental falsification. For readers of historical fiction, political history, and the literature of national identity, Waverly remains indispensable: adventurous yet reflective, generous in sympathy yet clear-eyed about rebellions costs. Begin here to see how the modern historical novel was madeand why later writers learned history by learning Scott.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

A Tale of Two Cities moves between London and Paris through the French Revolution, entwining Lucie Manette, Charles Darnay, and the dissipated yet redeemable Sydney Carton. Dickens fuses melodrama with the measured architecture of the historical novel, developing motifs of doubling, resurrection, and inexorable "footsteps." This unabridged edition restores Phizs original plates, whose chiaroscuro and crowd scenes intensify the books antithesesjustice and vengeance, private sentiment and public tumultwithin the 1859 culture of serial print. Composed as Dickens launched All the Year Round, the novel bears the tensile pacing of weekly serials and his exacting editorial control. Long preoccupied with reform and urban spectacle, and steeped in Carlyles French Revolution, he also drew on the stage pathos of his recent play The Frozen Deep; Cartons self-abnegation retains that theatrical psychology. Scholars and general readers alike will value this editions ethical clarity and narrative drive. It rewards courses and book clubs for its symmetries, rhetorical music, and political ambivalence, while Phizs images supply contemporaneous visual cues. A humane, urgent classic, newly vivid in text and image.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

Because of Stephen follows a young woman whose obligation to Stephen a figure whose welfare anchors her choices recasts love, work, and social standing. Hill renders parlors, boardinghouses, and offices with lucid domestic detail, balancing romance with forthright evangelical purpose. Episodic yet swift, the story is marked by prayer, Scripture, and providential turns that test integrity against polite cruelty and class pretension. As American Protestant domestic fiction, it bridges late sentimentalism and the cleaner lines of modern popular narrative. Grace Livingston Hill (1865-1947), daughter of a Presbyterian minister and niece of devotional novelist "Pansy" (Isabella Macdonald Alden), wrote from a life steeped in church work and practical charity. Early widowhood and the need to support family sharpened her sense of womens economic vulnerability, while evangelical formation anchored her insistence on conscience, conversion, and everyday holiness. Those pressures and convictions shape the books calm assurance that moral courage, exercised in ordinary rooms, can redirect a life. Recommended to readers of classic inspirational fiction and scholars of womens popular writing, Because of Stephen offers a gracious, suspense-touched meditation on duty, faith, and the costs of kindness. It will particularly reward anyone seeking clean romance with substantive spiritual and social texture.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

Set in late twelfth-century England under Norman rule, Ivanhoe tracks the disinherited knight, Rowena, Rebecca, and the outlaw Locksley through the Ashby tournament, abductions, and the siege of Torquilstone. Scott marries swift romance to learned archaism and multiple viewpoints, effectively founding the modern historical novel. His antiquarian detailheraldry, legal custom, monastic lifeframes a meditation on conquest, religious prejudice, and national reconciliation that reshaped later medievalism and the Robin Hood myth. Walter Scott, Scottish advocate, poet, and tireless collector of chronicles and border ballads, had reimagined Scotland in the Waverley Novels when, in 1819, he turned to the Plantagenet past. Drawing on medieval law, romance, and chronicle, he probed the aftershocks of conquest and the status of outsidersespecially Jewsprojecting debates on empire, union, and toleration through a medieval lens, all while maintaining the anonymity he then favored. Readers of historical fiction, medieval studies, or the history of nationalism will find Ivanhoe indispensable: a vigorous tale with an intellectual core. For its tournament spectacle, legal drama, and humane challenge to prejudice, it merits a place on syllabuses and the shelves of serious general readers.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

Set amid the Napoleonic Wars, Mr. Midshipman Easy follows Jack Easy, a youth reared on his fathers doctrine of absolute equality, as he collides with the Royal Navys hierarchies. Marryat blends crisp nautical realism with comic satire and a comingofage arc: boarding actions and Mediterranean cruises, Sicilian interludes, and a mock island republic steadily expose theory to sea-tested fact. Published in 1836, it anchors early Victorian maritime fiction. Frederick Marryat (17921848) rose from midshipman to post captain, seeing hard service against France and the United States; his rescue exploits and later invention of a widely used signaling code attest to practical mastery. After retiring, he edited magazines and turned experience into narrative art. The eras debates on reform and order sharpened his skepticism toward abstract egalitarianism and his sympathy for competence, captured in figures like the resourceful Mesty. Recommended to readers of OBrian and Forester, to historians of the long nineteenth century, and to anyone curious how ideas fare at sea. It entertains vigorously while provoking thought about authority, loyalty, and growthan enduring gateway to the tradition Marryat helped define.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

In The Vagabond (1910), Colette follows Renée Néré, a divorced music-hall performer, through Belle Époque Paris, recording the economics and erotic politics of a woman who works with her body yet refuses ownership. In supple first person, part diary and theater sketch, the novel marries sensuous detail to cool self-scrutiny as Renee weighs the comfort promised by a wealthy admirer against the hard-won clarity of solitude and work. Colettes tactile prose and modern psychological acuity probe performance, aging, and the gaze across trains, dressing rooms, and provincial stages. Colettes own trajectory animates this poise between art and autonomy. After ending her marriage to Willy, under whose name the Claudine books first appeared, she sustained herself on the music-hall stage. That apprenticeship supplies the novels authority, and she later returned to Renee in The Shackle to extend the inquiry. Readers of feminist modernism, theater history, and intimate psychological fiction will find The Vagabond indispensable. It offers a lucid, unsentimental account of desire, work, and self-making, avoiding melodrama without surrendering lyricism. Come for Colettes style; stay for Renees fierce, moving argument for freedom.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

The Lancashire Witches fuses meticulous regional realism with Gothic romance to reanimate the Pendle trials. A Tudor prologue at Whalley Abbey foreshadows the 1612 prosecutions, as Ainsworth braids Pottss Wonderfull Discoverie with ballad-like narration, dialect, and vivid topography. Courtroom scenes, village customs, and equivocal marvels sit side by side, producing a historical novel in the Scott tradition yet distinctly Victorian in its sensational pace and skepticism toward persecuting zeal. Manchester-born in 1805, Ainsworth united a native feel for Lancashire speech with a journalists archival appetite. The author of Rookwood, Jack Sheppard, and The Tower of London, he read Potts, parish records, and local histories, then walked the Pendle country he described. Debate over his "Newgate" tales honed his interest in punishment and spectacle, informing a narrative where law, rumor, and religious faction collide. Readers of historical fiction, legal history, and witchcraft studies will value this novels learned scaffolding and storytelling verve. Choose The Lancashire Witches for its living landscapes, responsible use of sources, and timely meditation on credulity, authority, and the stories communities tell to police belief.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Illustrated) follows Professor Aronnax, Conseil, and harpooner Ned Land as captives-turned-voyagers aboard Captain Nemos submersible, the Nautilus. Verne fuses lucid scientific exposition with romantic sublimity, alternating catalogues of marine life with scenes of polar peril and sunken empires. First serialized in 1869-70 within the Voyages extraordinaires, the novel pioneers speculative technology (electric power, autonomous cruising), while the illustrations concretize the vessels spaces and abyssal ecologies, intensifying instruction and wonder. Jules Verne, a rigorously researching French novelist, collaborated with publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel to craft didactic yet gripping Voyages extraordinaires. He absorbed reports on diving physiology, early submersibles like the Plongeur, and imperial geopolitics, shaping Nemo as a wounded cosmopolitan whose sovereignty beneath the waves mirrors nineteenth-century anxieties about technology, empire, and conscience. This edition suits readers of maritime history, science and technology studies, and classic adventure alike. The imagery supports close study of Vernes techno-poetic style and the Nautiluss operations, making it ideal for classrooms and enthusiasts. For its spectacle, ethical inquiry, and prophetic engineering, it remains a landmark of modern imaginative literature.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

The Paradise Mystery unfolds in a provincial English milieu, where an apparently ordinary death exposes a lattice of hidden ties, old grievances, and financial temptation. Fletcher structures the investigation around documents, topography, and routine inquiry, layering witness testimony and material evidence with a reporters patience. His lucid, unhurried prose and steady ratcheting of implication place the novel in the Edwardian transition from Victorian sensation to the Golden Age, combining civic realism with the satisfactions of the fair-play puzzle. J. S. Fletcher (18631935), a Yorkshire-born journalist and historian before turning decisively to fiction, wrote prolifically across history and crime. Years spent covering courts, inquests, and municipal affairs honed his attentiveness to procedure, financial motive, and local power structures. That professional apprenticeship, together with his intimate knowledge of provincial life, clearly informs the novels emphasis on documentary trails, cautious inference, and the quiet frictions of small-town society. Recommended to readers who relish methodical detection, textured provincial settings, and the genealogy of the modern whodunit, The Paradise Mystery rewards patience with cumulative clarity. It will particularly appeal to admirers of R. Austin Freeman and Freeman Wills Crofts, and to anyone curious about the genres evolution before the codification of Golden Age conventions.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

Around the World in Seventy-Two Days chronicles Nellie Blys 188990 circumnavigation, conceived as a real-life answer to Jules Vernes fiction. Writing in brisk, first-person reportage, Bly knits together ports and timetablesLondon, Brindisi, Suez, Colombo, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Franciscothrough the eras steamships, railways, and telegraph. She interviews Verne in Amiens, notes imperial infrastructures and cultural encounters, and dwells on the logistics of traveling with a single gripsack and one dress. The book belongs to late nineteenth-century New Journalism and travel writing, melding speed, spectacle, and empirical observation for a mass readership. Bly (born Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman) was a pathbreaking reporter for Joseph Pulitzers New York World, famous for Ten Days in a Mad-House and other investigative stunt pieces. Her record-setting voyageshadowed by rival Elizabeth Bislandwas at once a circulation gambit and a feminist wager, proving a woman could traverse the globe unchaperoned, manage money, and master schedules within the industrial networks of modernity. Readers of travel literature, journalism history, and gender studies will find this a propulsive primary source: a narrative of motion that also reveals the infrastructures and prejudices of its moment. For its pace, candor, and cultural insight, Blys classic remains indispensableand unexpectedly contemporary.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

A Simple Story (1791) unfolds in two parts: the first follows Miss Milner and her guardian, the Catholic priest Dorriforth, whose inheritance releases him from vows and makes him Lord Elmwood; the second, years later, turns to their daughter Matilda facing paternal estrangement and domestic despotism. Inchbald fuses sentimental and Gothic tones with stage economy, crafting scenes of moral suspense and silence. The narrative probes sensibility, female education, religious authority, and paternal law, while its abrupt temporal break exposes the costs of passion turned to power. A celebrated actress and playwright from a Catholic family, Inchbald brought to fiction theatrical timing and greenroom discipline. Her training in roleplaying, coupled with a lifelong negotiation of public voiceshe stammeredshapes the novels attention to speech withheld and feeling performed. Moving in the London milieu of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, wary of polemic, she forged a narrative that tests conduct-book orthodoxy without discarding it. Readers of Richardson, Burney, and Austen will find a taut study of desire, authority, and forgiveness. Scholars of gender, religion, and eighteenth-century form will prize its daring structure and theatrical poise; general readers will discover a story at once intimate and unsparing.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.