NOVELISTS · CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION
Graham Handley
Also known as: GRAHAM HANDLEY
The Tower House, 29 Melbury Road, is a late-Victorian townhouse in the Holland Park district of Kensington and Chelsea, London, built by the architect and designer William Burges as his home. Designed between 1875 and 1881, in the French Gothic Revival style, it was described by the architectural historian J. Mordaunt Crook as "the most complete example of a medieval secular interior produced by the Gothic Revival, and the last". The house is built of red brick, with Bath stone dressings and green roof slates from Cumbria, and has a distinctive cylindrical tower and conical roof. The ground floor contains a drawing room, a dining room and a library, while the first floor has two bedrooms and an armoury. Its exterior and the interior echo elements of Burges's earlier work, particularly Park House in Cardiff and Castell Coch.
The winter of 1775 was a hard one.
— from Jane Austen
Most acclaimed
Poems
This is an edition of all the known poems of Mark Akenside, the eighteenth-century English poet and physician, whose poetry has not been newly edited for more than a century. This edition will thus provide scholars and students with a much-needed opportunity to reassess the extent of Akenside's contribution to literary culture, and it will also clarify his role in the development of the aesthetic theories of his own generation and the one that followed. The career of Mark Akenside (1721-70) spans a period of extraordinarily fast change in English literature: his first major poem, The Pleasures of Imagination, appeared in the year of Pope's death; and Akenside died in the year Wordsworth was born. His works not only reflected the very considerable changes that took place during these years; they also contributed in many ways to the shifts in focus, interest, and emphasis that characterize the literature of the later eighteenth century. Akenside's fascination with the imagination, its characteristics and functions, resulted in an intriguing and influential blend of the poetic and the philosophical in his longer poems, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772). The earlier work explores the then new subject of aesthetics in greater detail than it had ever been explored before, presenting various original insights and arguments. Yet it would be wrong to see the poem as merely a versified philosophical treatise; its complex structure offers satisfactions beyond those of sequential logic, and the examples cited to illustrate the central ideas are imbued with considerable vigor and clarity. As products of, and contributors to, the eighteenth-century enthusiasm for aesthetics, Akenside's longer poems are captivating examples of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiment in developing the philosophical poem into a major literary form. It is for this reason above all others that they are valued by Coleridge and the writers of the next generation. Because of the comparative obscurity into which Akenside's works fell after the demise of the long philosophical poem in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they have not by and large attracted the attention of modern bibliographers. In this edition numerous bibliographical and textual puzzles presented by his poems are solved for the first time. The apparatus, meanwhile, demonstrates the full extent of the poet's urge to revise - an urge that extended from the wholesale rewriting of some poems to subtle alterations of textual minutiae, showing a mind and an ear alive to nuances of meaning and intonation.
Jane Austen
At the heart of Jane Austen's story lies a mystery: how a woman of "genteel poverty," the seventh child of a country clergyman, an unmarried spinster for whom life was often a struggle against the indignities of financial dependency, could have produced works of such magnificent warmth and wisdom. Valerie Grosvenor Myer's flawless research proves Austen's books grew from the preoccupations of her social set - respectability, financial security, and most of all, marriage. "It is a truth universally acknowledged," begins Pride and Prejudice, "that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." In that one line are revealed the principal forces at work in Austen's novels - and in the world from which they were drawn. For many middle-class women of Austen's day, marriage was paradoxically the only method of achieving independence. Marriage could also be a life sentence. Myer shows that by many accounts Austen was pretty and flirtatious (though occasionally also sharp-tongued), and the object of at least two proposals, but obstinate in her refusal to marry for other than love. Her obstinacy condemned her to reliance on her family for financial support. As Myer points out, it also enabled Austen to write her immortal novels. Using letters, family memories, and of course the novels themselves, Myer provides a detailed and revealing look at Jane Austen - her relationship with her beloved sister Cassandra, her devotion to and pride in her brothers and their children (who remembered "Aunt Jane" with warm affection), and her independence of mind and spirit. Austen's fondest dream was to establish herself not as another "silly female novelist," but as a serious and self-supporting writer. She reveled in the reviews of those of the novels published - anonymously - during her brief lifetime. Yet as Myer shows, no one, least of all Austen herself, could have imagined her posthumous popularity.