Virago modern classics

Successful lady novelist Laura Morland and her boisterous young son Tony set off to spend Christmas at her country home in the sleepy surrounds of High Rising. But Laura's wealthy friend and neighbour George Knox has taken on a scheming secretary whose designs on marriage to her employer threaten the delicate social fabric of the village. Can clever, practical Laura rescue George from Miss Grey's clutches and, what's more, help his daughter Miss Sibyl Knox to secure her longed-for engagement?

A brilliant picture of a rich, aristocratic Italian-American marriage and its consequences, down to the second generation.

With these words, the reader is ushered into an isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter recalls the chilling events that transpired as she began her new life as the young bride of a husband she barely knew. For in every corner of every room were phantoms of a time dead but not forgotten—a past devotedly preserved by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers: a suite immaculate and untouched, clothing laid out and ready to be worn, but not by any of the great house's current occupants. With an eerie presentiment of evil tightening her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter walked in the shadow of her mysterious predecessor, determined to uncover the darkest secrets and shattering truths about Maxim's first wife—the late and hauntingly beautiful Rebecca.

Lallie is one of four children of the eccentric, quintessentially English Rush family. Boating, bird watching and inter-family rivalry are the focus of life in their village – Pin Mill, on the Suffolk marshes. Brought up on fair play and the ‘family sense of humour’ the Rush children soon learn to fend for themselves – on water and on dry land. We watch as Lallie grows to adulthood; loving and hating her ‘ordinary’ family, carving a space for herself in the shadow of her beautiful sister Margaret, who claims the lion’s share of everything. But Lallie is special too, clear, clear-sighted, sexually aware. Just as well, for to keep the man she loves she faces the biggest family fight of all…

The story of protagonist Pompey Casmilus, a secretary in 1930s London, who writes her thoughts down on yellow office paper. She writes her musings about love, friendship, work, Germans, and numerous other topics. Amusing but somewhat plotless novel.

Recounts the love story of the American girl Bridget and the young Frenchman Nicolas whom she marries. Bridget goes to live with his wealthy, close-knit family who love each other to the exclusion of the outside world. But it is a love that festers.

A determined young lady who losses her focus along the line while trying to balance her life and relationship

One glorious gothic mansion - Garonlea - and two rather different ladies who would be Queen . . . Lady Charlotte French-McGrath has successfully ruled over her family with a rod of iron until the arrival of Cynthia: beautiful, young, talented, selfish - and engaged to her son Desmond. When Cynthia enters the Jazz Age, on the surface her life passes in a whirl of hunting, drinking and romance. But the ghosts of Garonlea are only biding their time: they know the source of their power, a secret handed on from one generation to the next.

A young girl befriends an elderly woman during the First World War in this remarkable novel by one of Britain’s best-loved authors... Sibyl Jardine, the former best friend of Rebecca Landon’s grandmother, has recently returned to the Priory, her home at the top of a hill. Rebecca is instantly drawn in by Sibyl’s magnetic personality and blunt, shocking manner. Decades earlier, Sibyl had left her husband Charles for another man and, as a result, lost her daughter Ianthe. Now she is finally about to meet her three grandchildren, who will become an integral part of Rebecca’s life as she journeys into adolescence. At the heart of this extraordinary novel is the enigma that is Sibyl Jardine: Is she a saint or a sinner? Is she a duplicitous lover or a woman who has been unjustly punished? Played out in a series of conversations between Rebecca, Sibyl Jardine, Jardine’s granddaughter Maisie, and a Cockney maid named Tilly, The Ballad and the Source is a tale of perception and memory, passion and betrayal, and the fearsome power of a mother’s love.

Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize this short novel is a slice of life set in the slums of Battersea in South London in the early nineteen sixties.

Based on the life of Ana de Mendoza, princess of Eboli.

"Christina Goering, eccentric and adventurous, and Frieda Copperfield, anxious but enterprising, are two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves. Old friends, each will take a surprising path in search of salvation: during a visit to Panama, Mrs. Copperfield abandons her husband, finding solace in a relationship with a teenage prostitute; while Miss Goering, a wealthy spinster, pursues sainthood via sordid encounters with the basest of men. At the end the two women meet again, each radically altered by her experience"--Provided by publisher.

The worst thing to happen to the season’s perfect couple: marriage When the young and gorgeous Helen Eskdale met the wealthy aristocrat Lord Teviot, everything clicked. This was a couple that was meant to be—the match of the year, if not the ages. But in the rush to the altar, there was no time for bride and groom to actually get to know each other. Now the question is: Can they keep their marriage from falling apart? The Semi-Attached Couple explores the upstairs-downstairs intrigues and comic misunderstandings central to the classic English romance with all the wit, style, and charm of a Jane Austen novel.

A devasting and hilarious comedy about an Edwardian caravan holiday in Kent: In the early years of the twentieth century, Baron Otto von Ottringel, a pompous and self-important major in the German army, is about to take a holiday abroad with his long-suffering second wife. His narrative of pained bewilderment at the bizarre behavior of the English people with whom he has chosen to spend a month in a convoy or horse-drawn holiday caravans is side-splittingly funny. We sympathize deeply with the lady whom he pursues in a platonic and very one sided holiday affair, and even more with Baroness Edelgard, who discovers her own holiday freedoms, and becomes newly emancipated in her marriage, to the Baron's horror. Reflecting frustration with and exasperated affection for German aristocratic society, The Caravaners reveals the lost world of European social networks and crusted assumptions that disappeared forever with the First World War.

From back cover: "One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother's wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave the comfortable home of her childhood, she is sent to London to live with relatives she has never met: Aunt Margaret, beautiful and speechless, and her brothers, Francie, whose graceful music belies his clumsy nature, and the volatile Finn, who kisses Melanie in the ruins of the pleasure gardens. And brooding Uncle Philip loves only the life-sized wooden puppets he creates in his toyshop. This classic gothic novel established Angela Carter as one of our most imaginative writers and augurs the themes of her later creative works."

In 1851 French Bishop Latour and his friend Father Valliant are dispatched to New Mexico to reawaken its slumbering Catholicism. Moving along the endless prairies, Latour spreads his faith the only way he knows-- gently, although he must contend with the unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Over nearly 40 years, they leave converts and enemies, crosses, and occasionally ecstasy in their wake. But it takes a death for them to make their mark on the landscape forever.

Dans la veine introspective du ##Journal d'Edith##, un roman cruel et quasi sadique qui n'est pas un récit criminel, mais sécrète un malaise inquiétant ... car "ceux qui frappent à la porte" font partie d'une secte qui devient une fin en soi.

Jessica and Jane have been living together for six months and are devoted friends - or are they? Jessica loves her friend with the cruelty of total possessiveness; Jane is rich, silly, and drinks rather too many brandy-and-sodas. Watching from the sidelines, their friend Sylvester regrets that Jane should be 'loved and bullied and perhaps even murdered by that frightful Jessica', but decides it's none of his business. When the Irish gentleman George Playfair meets Jane, however, he thinks otherwise and entices her to Ireland where the battle for her devotion begins.

Among the many fatalities attending the bloom of young desire, that of blindly taking to the confectionery line has not, perhaps, been sufficiently considered. How is the son of a British yeoman, who has been fed principally on salt pork and yeast dumplings, to know that there is satiety for the human stomach even in a paradise of glass jars full of sugared almonds and pink lozenges, and that the tedium of life can reach a pitch where plum-buns at discretion cease to offer the slightest excitement? Or how, at the tender age when a confectioner seems to him a very prince whom all the world must envy who breakfasts on macaroons, dines on meringues, sups on twelfth-cake, and fills up the intermediate hours with sugar-candy or peppermint how is he to foresee the day of sad wisdom, when he will discern that the confectioner's calling is not socially influential, or favourable to a soaring ambition? I have known a man who turned out to have a metaphysical genius, incautiously, in the period of youthful buoyancy, commence his career as a dancing- master; and you may imagine the use that was made of this initial mistake by opponents who felt themselves bound to warn the public against his doctrine of the Inconceivable.

Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parentsa fencer, a horse rider and a keen scholar. Stephen grows to be a war hero, a bestselling writer and a loyal, protective lover. But Stephen is a woman, and her lovers are women. As her ambitions drive her, and society confines her, Stephen is forced into desperate actions.

"Written from the perspective of a male narrator, Willa Cather's classic novel is an American version of "Madame Bovary". It is a portrait of a talented woman trapped in the conventions and economic restraints of a marriage. It is the story of a woman who defies expectations, and whose personal changes coincide with the transforming American Frontier. In this work, Willa Cather expressed her profoundly modern feminist views in the life of an ordinary and gifted woman who is stifled by marriage."--Ingram.

The protagonists are Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas von Twinkler, 17-year-old twins from an aristocratic, half-German family. Orphaned, they are sent to an uncle in England, but World War I is on and afraid of anti-German hysteria, the uncle packs them off to America. On the ship they are befriended by a man who becomes the girls' protector on their American adventure.

In affairs of the heart, the race is not necessarily won by the swift or the fair. Imogen, the beautiful and much younger wife of distinguished barrister Evelyn Gresham, is facing the greatest challenge of her married life. Their neighbour Blanche Silcox, competent, middle-aged and ungainly—the very opposite of Imogen—seems to be vying for Evelyn's attention. And to Imogen's increasing disbelief, she may be succeeding.

Banned in Ireland when it was first published in 1936, Talk of Angels is an extraordinary novel by Kate O'Brien, one of the preeminent modern Irish women writers, whose influence and importance are being rediscovered today by a new generation of readers. A powerful and romantic tale of lost innocence and illicit love, Talk of Angels is set in Spain as the country is moving toward the brink of civil war. Mary Lavelle, a young Irish woman, journeys there to work as a governess with the Areavaga family. With the arrival of their handsome son Juanito, Mary soon finds her convent education and beliefs challenged by his fiery politics and passionate opinions that are not only at odds with the government, but also with those of his own aristocratic wife. Finding themselves at the heart of a family and a nation divided, Mary and Juanito seize the opportunity to consummate their newfound love in a night of passion and betrayal that foretells the coming of a new era.

The goal of the provincial lady is to maintain 'niceness', whether it be in the home, relationships or personal behaviour. 'The Diary of a Provincial Lady' first published in the 1930s is a witty celebration of the suburban British housewife between the wars.

This famous novel, first published in 1934, is based on the sensational Thompson-Bywaters murder case of 1923, which ended with the conviction and execution of Mrs Thompson and her lover for the murder of her husband.

Determined to leave behind the dull values of her small hometown, an opera singer devotes increasing amounts of energy to developing her art.

“The Glimpses of the Moon” is a romance story. Nick and Susy are the main characters and have no money. They belong to a society of wealthy people, and they plan to get married to better themselves financially from the wedding with the gifts they will receive.Please Note: This book is easy to read in true text, not scanned images that can sometimes be difficult to decipher. The Microsoft eBook has a contents page linked to the chapter headings for easy navigation. The Adobe eBook has bookmarks at chapter headings and is printable up to two full copies per year. Both versions are text searchable.

The third novel in Katherine Susannah Prichard's goldfields trilogy, Winged Seeds (1950) sees her writing about a war which was only just over. It begins brightly in 1936, with vivacious twins turning up on the doorstep of the trilogy's hero, the aging Sally Gough. Pat and Pam are twenty years old and the stepdaughters of Sally's arch-enemy, Sir Paddy Cavan. Their visit gives Prichard an opportunity to show us the state of goldfields at the time. Their flirtatious ways set tongues wagging in Kalgoorlie-Boulder and a barometer of the sexual mores of the time. Yet the twins are not as easy as they seem; Pam is faithful to her fiancee fighting in the Spanish Civil War and Pat is in love with Sally's grandson,Bill. They are fiercely anti-fascist, but cannot reveal their true sympathies until they turn twenty-one and inherit their father's fortune, currently held by their wicked stepfather. Bill is the communist hero of this installment, taking on the mantle from his uncle, Tom, who dies early in the novel, his lungs destroyed by the mine. Bill is torn between his dedication to the cause and his desire for the "siren" Pat. With various other subplots, there is already plenty enough to sustain an interesting narrative, but as in several other novels Prichard's, she unpicks her own set up. The twins leave suddenly; Bill goes off to fight World War Two. The protagonists of the first half only put in guest appearances for the rest of the novel, as the focus returns to Sally, as she struggles with what to make of World War Two, swayed and confused by debates around it, as well as re-living the grief of the Great War in which she lost one son and a second from its after-effects. Bill returns home from Greece injured, only to recover and be sent to New Guinea, where he goes missing, presumed killed by the Japanese. Pat drifts away from her commitment to progressive politics, marrying an American officer. What was the novel building toward in its first half if not for bill and the twins to do something extraordinary for the cause of communism? There is poignancy, though, in Sally trying to make sense of Bill's death, and to find transcendence in the midst of death and disappointment . The trilogy finishes wearily, with the two survivors, Sally and Dinny, burying Kalgoorla, the Aboriginal woman who they have known from the beginning, finding hope in the winged seeds blown out from the kalgoorluh plant. Sally's sons were dead, her grandson Billy was dead, but the ideas they lived for were immortal: "The life force strives towards perfection. What other imperative is there in living? The struggle had gone through the ages. The vital germ in a seed attained its fine flowering and full fruit. How then could the great ideas and ideals of human progress be denied and annihilated? They could not. That was what Bill had believed, and what he tried to make people understand.

In the stifling heat and melting nights of the tropics, love comes naturally to Pierre, the exiled Frenchman, and Liana, native wife of the richest man on the island. In a realistic analysis of a woman's degradation, this novel handles a delicate subject with frankness and power.