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In a German Pension (1911),



Anne Frank

During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlnds, Anne Frank received a blank diary as one of her

presents on June 12, 1942, her 13 th birthday. According to the Anne Frank House, the red,

checkered authograph book which Anne used as her diary was actually not a surprise, since she

had chosen it the day before with her father when browsing a bookstore near her home. She

began to write it on June 14, 1942, two days later. On July 5, 1942, Anne’s older sister Margot received an official summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany, and on July 6, Margot and Anne went into hiding with their father Otto and mother Edith. They were joined by Herman van Pels, Otto’s business partner, including his wife Auguste and their teenage son Peter. Their hiding place was in the sealed-off upper rooms of the annex at the back of Otto’s company building in Amsterdam. Otto Frank started his business, named Opecta, in 1933. He was licensed to manufacture and sell pectin, a substance used to make jam. He stopped running his business wh8ile everybody was in hiding. But once he returned, he found his employees running it. The rooms that everybody hid in were concealed behind a movable bookcase in the same building as Opekta. Mrs.van Pels’s dentist, Fritz Pfefer, joined them four months later. In the published version, names were changed: The van Pelses are known as the Van Daans, and Fritz Pfefer as Albert Dussel. With the assistance of a group of Otto Frank’s trusted colleagues, they remained hidden for two years and one month. In August 1944, they were discovered and deported to Nazi camps. They were long thought to have been betrayed, although there are indications that their discovery may have been accidental, that the police raid had actually targeted “ration fraud”. Of the eight people, only Otto Frank, the oldest, survived the war. Anne died when she was 15 years old in Bergen-Belsen, from typhus. The exact date of her death is unknown, and has long been believed to be in early March, a few weeks before the prisoners were liberated by British troops in April 1945. However, new research in 2015 indicated that Anne may have died in February. In manuscript, written on loose sheets of paper, was found strewn on the floor of the hiding place

by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuiji after the family’s arrest, but before their rooms were ransacked

by the Dutch police and the Gestapo. They were kept safe, and given to Otto Frank after the war,

with the original notes, when Anne’s death was confirmed in the autumn of 1945.

The diary is not written in the classic forms of Dear Diary” or as letters to oneself; Anne calls her

diary “Kitty”, so almost all of the letters are written to Kitty. Anne used the above-mentioned

names for her annex-mates in the first volume, from September 25, 1942 until November 13,

when the first notebook ends. It is believed that these names were taken from characters found in

a series of popular Dutch books written by Cissy van Marxveldt. Anne’s already budding literary ambitions were galvanized on 29 March 1944 when she heard a London radio broadcast made by the exiled Dutch Minister for Education, Art, and Science, Gerrit Bolkestein, calling for the preservation of “ordinary documents –a diary, letters … simple everyday material” to create an archive for posterity as testimony to the suffering of civilians during the Nazi occupation. On May 20, 1944, she notes that she started re-drafting her diary with future readers in mind. She expanded entries and standardized them by addressing all of them to Kitty, clarified situations, prepared a list of pseudonyms, and cut scenes she thought would be of little interest or too intimate for general consumption. By the time she started the second existing volume, she as writing only to Kitty.

In his will, Otto Frank bequeathed the original manuscripts to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. The copyright however belongs to the Anne Frank Fonds, a Switzerland-based foundation of Basel which was the sole inheritor of Frank after his death in 1980.

Louisa May Alcott (1832 – 1888) was an American novelist and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women(1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown,which is now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on her father's 33rd birthday. She was the daughter of transcendentalist and educator Amos Bronson Alcott and social worker Abby May and the second of four daughters: Anna Bronson Alcott was the eldest; Elizabeth Sewall Alcott and Abigail May Alcott were the two youngest. The family moved to Boston in 1834,where Alcott's father established an experimental school and joined the Transcendental Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Bronson Alcott's opinions on education and tough views on child-rearing shaped young Alcott's mind with a desire to achieve perfection, a goal of the transcendentalists.His attitudes towards Alcott's wild and independent behavior, and his inability to provide for his family, created conflict between Bronson Alcott and his wife and daughters. Poverty made it necessary for Alcott to go to work at an early age as a teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer. Her sisters also supported the family, working as seamstresses, while their mother took on social work among the Irish immigrants. As an adult, Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly. When the American Civil War broke out, she served as a nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, DC, for six weeks in 1862–1863.[6] She intended to serve three months as a nurse Alcott became even more successful with the first part of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868), a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood with her sisters in Concord, Massachusetts, published by the Roberts Brothers. Part two, or Part Second, also known as Good Wives (1869), followed the March sisters into adulthood and marriage. Little Men (1871) detailed Jo's life at the Plumfield School that she founded with her husband Professor Bhaer at the conclusion of Part Two of Little Women. Jo's Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga".Though Alcott never married, she did take in May's daughter, Louisa, after May's death in 1879 from childbed fever, caring for little "Lulu" until her death. Alcott died of a stroke at age 55 in Boston, on March 6, 1888,[21] two days after her father's death. Lulu, her niece was only 8 years old when Louisa died. Louisa's last known words were "Is it not meningitis?"[23] She is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, near Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, on a hillside now known as "Authors' Ridge"

“LITTLE WOMEN”

Character List

Josephine March - The protagonist of the novel, and the second-oldest March sister. Jo, who wants to be a writer, is based on Louisa May Alcott herself, which makes the story semi-autobiographical. Jo has a temper and a quick tongue, although she works hard to control both. She is a tomboy, and reacts with impatience to the many limitations placed on women and girls. She hates romance in her real life, and wants nothing more than to hold her family together.

Meg March - The oldest March sister. Responsible and kind, Meg mothers her younger sisters. She has a small weakness for luxury and leisure, but the greater part of her is gentle, loving, and morally vigorous.

Beth March - The third March daughter. Beth is very quiet and very virtuous, and she does nothing but try to please others. She adores music and plays the piano very well.

Amy March - The youngest March girl. Amy is an artist who adores visual beauty and has a weakness for pretty possessions. She is given to pouting, fits of temper, and vanity; but she does attempt to improve herself.

Laurie Laurence - The rich boy who lives next door to the Marches. Laurie, whose real name is Theodore Laurence, becomes like a son and brother to the Marches. He is charming, clever, and has a good heart.

Marmee - The March girls’ mother. Marmee is the moral role model for her girls. She counsels them through all of their problems and works hard but happily while her husband is at war.

Mr. March - The March girls’ father and Marmee’s husband. He serves in the Union army as a chaplain. When he returns home, he continues acting as a minister to a nearby parish.

Mr. Brooke - Laurie’s tutor. Mr. Brooke is poor but virtuous.

Frederick Bhaer - A respected professor in Germany who becomes an impoverished language instructor in America. Mr. Bhaer lives in New York, where he meets Jo. He is kind and fatherly.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus(1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poetand philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopherWilliam Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. After Wollstonecraft's death less than a month after her daughter Mary was born, Mary was raised by Godwin, who was able to provide his daughter with a rich, if informal, education, encouraging her to adhere to his own liberal political theories. When Mary was four, her father married a neighbour, with whom, as her stepmother, Mary came to have a troubled relationship.[2][3] In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, Mary and Shelley left for France and travelled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet. In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Mary Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at age 53. Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Mary Shelley’s achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalypticnovel The Last Man (1826), and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–46), support the growing view that Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.

FRANKENSTEIN In a series of letters, Robert Walton, the captain of a ship bound for the North Pole, recounts to his sister back in England the progress of his dangerous mission. Successful early on, the mission is soon interrupted by seas full of impassable ice. Trapped, Walton encounters Victor Frankenstein, who has been traveling by dog-drawn sledge across the ice and is weakened by the cold. Walton takes him aboard ship, helps nurse him back to health, and hears the fantastic tale of the monster that Frankenstein created. Victor first describes his early life in Geneva. At the end of a blissful childhood spent in the company of Elizabeth Lavenza (his cousin in the 1818 edition, his adopted sister in the 1831 edition) and friend Henry Clerval, Victor enters the university of Ingolstadt to study natural philosophy and chemistry. There, he is consumed by the desire to discover the secret of life and, after several years of research, becomes convinced that he has found it. Armed with the knowledge he has long been seeking, Victor spends months feverishly fashioning a creature out of old body parts. One climactic night, in the secrecy of his apartment, he brings his creation to life. When he looks at the monstrosity that he has created, however, the sight horrifies him. After a fitful night of sleep, interrupted by the specter of the monster looming over him, he runs into the streets, eventually wandering in remorse. Victor runs into Henry, who has come to study at the university, and he takes his friend back to his apartment. Though the monster is gone, Victor falls into a feverish illness. Sickened by his horrific deed, Victor prepares to return to Geneva, to his family, and to health. Just before departing Ingolstadt, however, he receives a letter from his father informing him that his youngest brother, William, has been murdered. Grief-stricken, Victor hurries home. While passing through the woods where William was strangled, he catches sight of the monster and becomes convinced that the monster is his brother’s murderer. Arriving in Geneva, Victor finds that Justine Moritz, a kind, gentle girl who had been adopted by the Frankenstein household, has been accused. She is tried, condemned, and executed, despite her assertions of innocence. Victor grows despondent, guilty with the knowledge that the monster he has created bears responsibility for the death of two innocent loved ones. Hoping to ease his grief, Victor takes a vacation to the mountains. While he is alone one day, crossing an enormous glacier, the monster approaches him. The monster admits to the murder of William but begs for understanding. Lonely, shunned, and forlorn, he says that he struck out at William in a desperate attempt to injure Victor, his cruel creator. The monster begs Victor to create a mate for him, a monster equally grotesque to serve as his sole companion. Victor refuses at first, horrified by the prospect of creating a second monster. The monster is eloquent and persuasive, however, and he eventually convinces Victor. After returning to Geneva, Victor heads for England, accompanied by Henry, to gather information for the creation of a female monster. Leaving Henry in Scotland, he secludes himself on a desolate island in the Orkneys and works reluctantly at repeating his first success. One night, struck by doubts about the morality of his actions, Victor glances out the window to see the monster glaring in at him with a frightening grin. Horrified by the possible consequences of his work, Victor destroys his new creation. The monster, enraged, vows revenge, swearing that he will be with Victor on Victor’s wedding night. Later that night, Victor takes a boat out onto a lake and dumps the remains of the second creature in the water. The wind picks up and prevents him from returning to the island. In the morning, he finds himself ashore near an unknown town. Upon landing, he is arrested and informed that he will be tried for a murder discovered the previous night. Victor denies any knowledge of the murder, but when shown the body, he is shocked to behold his friend Henry Clerval, with the mark of the monster’s fingers on his neck. Victor falls ill, raving and feverish, and is kept in prison until his recovery, after which he is acquitted of the crime. Shortly after returning to Geneva with his father, Victor marries Elizabeth. He fears the monster’s warning and suspects that he will be murdered on his wedding night. To be cautious, he sends Elizabeth away to wait for him. While he awaits the monster, he hears Elizabeth scream and realizes that the monster had been hinting at killing his new bride, not himself. Victor returns home to his father, who dies of grief a short time later. Victor vows to devote the rest of his life to finding the monster and exacting his revenge, and he soon departs to begin his quest. Victor tracks the monster ever northward into the ice. In a dogsled chase, Victor almost catches up with the monster, but the sea beneath them swells and the ice breaks, leaving an unbridgeable gap between them. At this point, Walton encounters Victor, and the narrative catches up to the time of Walton’s fourth letter to his sister. Walton tells the remainder of the story in another series of letters to his sister. Victor, already ill when the two men meet, worsens and dies shortly thereafter. When Walton returns, several days later, to the room in which the body lies, he is startled to see the monster weeping over Victor. The monster tells Walton of his immense solitude, suffering, hatred, and remorse. He asserts that now that his creator has died, he too can end his suffering. The monster then departs for the northernmost ice to die.

Meg Cabot (born Meggin Patricia Cabot; February 1, 1967) is an American author of romantic and paranormal fiction for teens and adults. She has written and published over fifty books, and is best known for The Princess Diaries, later made by Walt Disney Pictures into two feature films of the same name. Meg's books have been the recipients of numerous awards.

PRINCESS DIARIES Mia Thermopolis is a 14 year old girl, living in Manhattan. Her parents have broken up, she is 5 feet 9 inches tall, isn’t particularly pretty, unpopular and has never had a boyfriend. She thinks that is unusual. But one day, her dad comes for a visit to tell her some life-changing news. She is a princess! Mia thinks that she is the most unfit person in the whole world to be a princess and doesn’t want to be one at all, but she hasn’t got a choice. She desperately wants it to be a secret because if everyone knew, it would make life at school even worse. How long will it be hidden ? The Princess Diaries is written in the form of a diary of a 14-year-old girl where she expresses her intimate thoughts, feelings dreams and desires. The main character – Mia Thermopolis – lives with her artist mom Helen and her cat, Fat Louis, in New York City. She’s a typical teenager who’s got a lot problems: she’s unpopular at school, she looks like a freak, she’s got huge feet, she’s flunking Algebra, no boy has ever asked her out on a date. Then her mom starts dating Mia’s Algebra teacher. And above all – Mia’s dad comes from a make-up European country called Genovia and tells Mia that he’s not just a famous politician but the Prince of Genovia and Mia is a princess and his only heir to the throne. Some teenage girls dream of being a princess and would be glad to hear such news. But Mia is shocked. She’s shy and timid. She’s unwilling to change her life. For Mia, being a princess is just another problem she has to deal with and solve. Mia’s dream is to join Greenpeace and save whales from danger. She also wants to look like her classmate Lana Weinberger who is very beautiful and dates Josh Richter, the best-looking boy in the school. Mia’s dad, Philip Renaldo, reaches an agreement with her. According to it, Mia will become the ruler of Genovia when he dies. Mia will also have to attend special princess lessons and to learn how to behave like a princess. The lessons will be given by Grandmere, who is a bit scary and very extravagant. Mia does her best, overcomes different problems and at the end of the book she finds her love and feels peaceful and happy. The book shows how to stay true to yourself, your friends and your family even if your world is turned upside down. Mia has courage to face great, unexpected and even unbelievable changes in her life. She reveals her best qualities – honesty, kindness, sincerity. The book is realistic and romantic at the same time. It’s about friendship and betrayal, about complicated relations at school and in the family. It reminds the reader that love, compassion, sympathy are the most precious things in life. It’s a girly book. I gave it to some boys to read. I simply wanted them to read something in English. I was a bit surprised when they read the whole Princess Diaries series and enjoyed it! Modern boys also have romantic feelings and dream of kind and understanding girls. I think this funny and entertaining book is worth reading.

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow, the daughter of Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor of Fine Art at the University of Moscow, who later founded the Alexander III Museum (known from 1937 as the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts). Tsvetaeva's mother, Maria Alexandrovna Meyn, Ivan's second wife, was a concert pianist, highly literate, with German and Polish ancestry. Growing up in considerable material comfort, Tsvetaeva would later come to identify herself with the Polish aristocracy. In 1902 Tsvetaeva's mother contracted tuberculosis. A change in climate was believed to help cure the disease, and so the family travelled abroad until shortly before her death in 1906, when Tsvetaeva was 14. They lived for a while by the sea at Nervi, near Genoa. She began spending time at Voloshin's home in the Black Sea resort of Koktebel("Blue Height"), which was a well-known haven for writers, poets and artists.She became enamoured of the work of Aleksandr Blok and Anna Akhmatova, although she never met Blok and did not meet Akhmatova until the 1940s. Tsvetaeva's poetry was admired by poets such as Valery Bryusov, Maximilian Voloshin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Anna Akhmatova. Later, that recognition was also expressed by the poet Joseph Brodsky, pre-eminent among Tsvetaeva's champions.

POETRY

Tsvetaeva's lyric poems fill ten collections; the uncollected lyrics would add at least another volume. Her first two collections indicate their subject matter in their titles: Evening Album (Vechernii al'bom, 1910) and The Magic Lantern (Volshebnyi fonar', 1912). The poems are vignettes of a tranquil childhood and youth in a professorial, middle-class home in Moscow, and display considerable grasp of the formal elements of style. The full range of Tsvetaeva's talent developed quickly, and was undoubtedly influenced by the contacts she had made at Koktebel, and was made evident in two new collections: Mileposts(Versty, 1921) and Mileposts: Book One (Versty, Vypusk I, 1922). Three elements of Tsvetaeva's mature style emerge in the Mileposts collections. First, Tsvetaeva dates her poems and publishes them chronologically. The poems in Mileposts: Book One, for example, were written in 1916 and resolve themselves as a versified journal. Secondly, there are cycles of poems which fall into a regular chronological sequence among the single poems, evidence that certain themes demanded further expression and development. One cycle announces the theme of Mileposts: Book One as a whole: the "Poems of Moscow." Two other cycles are dedicated to poets, the "Poems to Akhmatova" and the "Poems to Blok", which again reappear in a separate volume, Poems to Blok (Stikhi k Bloku, 1922). Thirdly, the Mileposts collections demonstrate the dramatic quality of Tsvetaeva's work, and her ability to assume the guise of multiple dramatis personae within them. The collection Separation (Razluka, 1922) was to contain Tsvetaeva's first long verse narrative, "On a Red Steed" ("Na krasnom kone"). The poem is a prologue to three more verse-narratives written between 1920 and 1922. All four narrative poems draw on folkloric plots. Tsvetaeva acknowledges her sources in the titles of the very long works, The Maiden Tsar: A Fairy-tale Poem (Tsar'-devitsa: Poema-skazka, 1922) and "The Swain", subtitled "A Fairytale" ("Molodets: skazka", 1924). The fourth folklore-style poem is "Byways" ("Pereulochki", published in 1923 in the collection Remeslo), and it is the first poem which may be deemed incomprehensible in that it is fundamentally a soundscape of language. The collection Psyche(Psikheya, 1923) contains one of Tsvetaeva's best-known cycles "Insomnia" (Bessonnitsa) and the poem The Swans' Encampment (Lebedinyi stan, Stikhi 1917-1921, published in 1957) which celebrates the White Army.

 The topic of hell

Tsvetaeva was so infatuated by the subject that she was looking for the topic in other poets writings and even used their lines as a base for her narrative,[22] for example: Two suns are growing cool, O God have mercy! One in heaven in one in my breast. How these suns - will I ever forgive myself? - How these suns used to drive me wild [with love]! And both are growing cool, their rays no longer hurt. And the more ardent one the first too cool.

— Frantz Shubert, Die Nebensonnen, Die Wintereise

Emigrant

Subsequently, as an émigré, Tsvetaeva's last two collections of lyrics were published by émigré presses, Craft (Remeslo, 1923) in Berlin and After Russia (Posle Rossii, 1928) in Paris. There then followed the twenty-three lyrical "Berlin" poems, the pantheistic "Trees" ("Derev'ya"), "Wires" ("Provoda") and "Pairs" ("Dvoe"), and the tragic "Poets" ("Poety"). "After Russia" contains the poem "In Praise of the Rich", in which Tsvetaeva's oppositional tone is merged with her proclivity for ruthless satire. Eschatological topics In 1924, Tsvetaeva wrote "Poem of the End", which details a walk around Prague and across its bridges; the walk is about the final walk she will take with her lover Konstantin Rodzevich. In it everything is foretold: in the first few lines (translated by Elaine Feinstein) the future is already written:

A single post, a point of rusting

tin in the sky

marks the fated place we

move to, he and I

Again, further poems foretell future developments. Principal among these is the voice of the classically oriented Tsvetaeva heard in cycles "The Sibyl," "Phaedra," and "Ariadne." Tsvetaeva's beloved, ill-starred heroines recur in two verse plays, Theseus-Ariadne (Tezei-Ariadna, 1927) and Phaedra (Fedra, 1928). These plays form the first two parts of an incomplete trilogy Aphrodite's Rage.

Satire

The satirist in Tsvetaeva plays second fiddle only to the poet-lyricist. Several satirical poems, moreover, are among Tsvetaeva's best-known works: "The Train of Life" ("Poezd zhizni") and "The Floorcleaners' Song" ("Poloterskaya"), both included in After Russia, and The Rat-Catcher (Krysolov, 1925–1926), a long, folkloric narrative. The target of Tsvetaeva's satire is everything petty and petty bourgeois. Unleashed against such dull creature comforts is the vengeful, unearthly energy of workers both manual and creative. In her notebook, Tsvetaeva writes of "The Floorcleaners' Song": "Overall movement: the floorcleaners ferret out a house's hidden things, they scrub a fire into the door... What do they flush out? Coziness, warmth, tidiness, order... Smells: incense, piety. Bygones. Yesterday... The growing force of their threat is far stronger than the climax." The poem which Tsvetaeva describes as liricheskaia satira, The Rat-Catcher, is loosely based on the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The Rat-Catcher, which is also known as The Pied Piper, is considered by some to be the finest of Tsvetaeva's work. It was also partially an act of homage to Heinrich Heine's poem Die Wanderratten. The Rat-Catcher appeared initially, in serial format, in the émigré journal Volia Rossii in 1925-1926 whilst still being written. It was not to appear in the Soviet Union until after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1956. Its hero is the Pied Piper of Hamelin who saves a town from hordes of rats and then leads the town's children away too, in retribution for the citizens' ingratitude. As in the other folkloric narratives, The Rat-Catcher's story line emerges indirectly through numerous speaking voices which shift from invective, to extended lyrical flights, to pathos. Tsvetaeva's last ten years of exile, from 1928 when "After Russia" appeared until her return in 1939 to the Soviet Union, were principally a "prose decade", though this would almost certainly be by dint of economic necessity rather than one of choice.

1. Harriet Beecher Stowe was a world-renowned American writer, staunch abolitionist and one of the most influential women of the 19th century. Although she wrote dozens of books, essays and articles during her lifetime, she was best known for her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin Or, Life Among the Lowly, which brought unprecedented light to the plight of slaves and, many historians believe, helped incite the American Civil War.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin tells the story of Tom, an honorable, unselfish slave who’s taken from his wife and children to be sold at auction. On a slave transport ship, he saves the life of Eva, a white girl from a wealthy family. Eva’s father purchases Tom, and Tom and Eva become good friends. In the meantime, Eliza – another slave from the same plantation as Tom – learns of plans to sell her son George. Eliza escapes the plantation with George, but they’re hunted down by a slave catcher whose views on slavery are eventually changed by Quakers. Eva becomes ill and, on her deathbed, asks her father to free his slaves. He agrees but is killed before he can, and Tom is sold to a ruthless new owner who employs violence and coercion to keep his slaves in line. After helping two slaves escape, Tom is beaten to death for not revealing their whereabouts. Throughout his life, he clings to his steadfast Christian faith, even as he lay dying. Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s strong Christian message reflected Stowe’s belief that slavery and the Christian doctrine were at odds; in her eyes, slavery was clearly a sin. The book was first published in serial form (1851-1852) as a group of sketches in the National Era and then as a two-volume novel. The book sold 10,000 copies the first week. Over the next year, it sold 300,000 copies in America and over one million copies in Britain. Stowe became an overnight success and went on tour in the United States and Britain promoting Uncle Tom’s Cabin and her abolitionist views. But it was considered unbecoming for women of Stowe’s era to speak publicly to large audiences of men. So, despite her fame, she seldom spoke about the book in public, even at events held in her honor. Instead, Calvin or one of her brothers spoke for her. Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought slavery into the limelight like never before, especially in the northern states. Its characters and their daily experiences made people uncomfortable as they realized slaves had families and hopes and dreams like everyone else, yet were considered chattel and exposed to terrible living conditions and violence. It made slavery personal and relatable instead of just some “peculiar institution” in the South. It also sparked outrage. In the North, the book stoked anti-slavery views. According to The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Frederick Douglasscelebrated that Stowe had “baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared nothing for the bleeding slave.” Abolitionists grew from a relatively small, outspoken group to a large and potent political force. But in the South, Uncle Tom’s Cabin infuriated slave owners who preferred to keep the darker side of slavery to themselves. They felt attacked and misrepresented – despite Stowe’s including benevolent slave owners in the book – and stubbornly held tight to their belief that slavery was an economic necessity and slaves were inferior people incapable of taking care of themselves. 2. Pippi Longstocking is the main character in an eponymous series of children's books by the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. Pippi was named by Lindgren's daughter Karin, then nine years old like Pippi, who asked her mother for a get-well story when she was off school. Pippi is red-haired, freckled, unconventional and superhumanly strong – able to lift her horse one-handed. She is playful and unpredictable. She often makes fun of unreasonable adults, especially if they are pompous and condescending. Her anger comes out in extreme cases, such as when a man ill-treats his horse. Pippi, like Peter Pan, does not want to grow up. She is the daughter of a buccaneer captain and has adventure stories to tell about that too. Her four best friends are her horse and monkey, and the neighbours' children, Tommy and Annika. After being rejected by Bonnier Publishers in 1944, Lindgren's first manuscript was accepted by Rabén and Sjögren. The first three Pippi chapter books were published in 1945–48, followed by three short stories and a number of picture book adaptations. They have been translated into 76 languages (2018)and made into several films and television series. Pippi Longstocking is a fictional nine-year-old girl. She moves into Villa Villekulla, her house that she shares with her monkey named Mr. Nillson and her horse, and quickly befriends the two children living next door, Tommy and Annika Settergren.With her suitcase of gold coins, she maintains an independent lifestyle without her parents: her mother died soon after her birth, and her father, Captain Ephraim Longstocking, is first missing at sea, and then, king of a South Sea island.Despite periodic attempts by village authorities to make her conform to cultural expectations of what a child's life should be, such as unsuccessfully sending her to school, Pippi happily lives free from social conventions.According to Eva-Maria Metcalf, Pippi "loves her freckles and her tattered clothes and makes not the slightest attempt to suppress her wild imagination or to adopt good manners." She has a penchant for storytelling, which often takes the form of tall tales.When discussing Pippi, Astrid Lindgren explained that "Pippi represents my own childish longing for a person who has power but does not abuse it. And pay attention to the fact that Pippi never does that." Although she is the self-proclaimed "strongest girl in the world," Pippi often uses nonviolence to solve conflicts or protect other children from bullying. Pippi has been variously described by literary critics as "warm-hearted," compassionate,kind clever, generous, playful, and witty to the point of besting adult characters in conversation. Laura Hoffeld wrote that while Pippi's "naturalness entails selfishness, ignorance, and a marked propensity to lie," the character "is simultaneously generous, quick and wise, and true to herself and others."

3. Dame Iris Murdoch, original name in full Jean Iris Murdoch, married name Mrs. John O. Bayley, (born July 15, 1919, Dublin, Ireland—died February 8, 1999, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England), British novelist and philosopher noted for her psychological novels that contain philosophical and comic elements. After an early childhood spent in London, Murdoch went to Badminton School, Bristol, and from 1938 to 1942 studied at Somerville College, Oxford. Between 1942 and 1944 she worked in the British Treasury and then for two years as an administrative officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. In 1948 she was elected a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Murdoch’s first published work was a critical study, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953). This was followed by two novels, Under the Net (1954) and The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), that were admired for their intelligence, wit, and high seriousness. These qualities, along with a rich comic sense and a gift for analyzing the tensions and complexities in sophisticated sexual relationships, continued to distinguish her work. With what is perhaps her finest book, The Bell (1958), Murdoch began to attain wide recognition as a novelist. She went on to a highly prolific career with such novels as A Severed Head (1961), The Red and the Green (1965), The Nice and the Good (1968), The Black Prince (1973), Henry and Cato (1976), The Sea, the Sea (1978, Booker Prize), The Philosopher’s Pupil(1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The Message to the Planet(1989), and The Green Knight (1993). Murdoch’s last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), was not well received; some critics attributed the novel’s flaws to the Alzheimer’s disease with which she had been diagnosed in 1994. Murdoch’s husband, the novelist John Bayley, chronicled her struggle with the disease in his memoir, Elegy for Iris (1999). A selection of her voluminous correspondence was published as Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995 (2016). Murdoch’s novels typically have convoluted plots in which innumerable characters representing different philosophical positions undergo kaleidoscopic changes in their relations with each other. Realistic observations of 20th-century life among middle-class professionals are interwoven with extraordinary incidents that partake of the macabre, the grotesque, and the wildly comic. The novels illustrate Murdoch’s conviction that although human beings think they are free to exercise rational control over their lives and behaviour, they are actually at the mercy of the unconscious mind, the determining effects of society at large, and other, more inhuman, forces. In addition to producing novels, Murdoch wrote plays, verse, and works of philosophy and literary criticism.

4. Nawal El Saadawi was born in 1931 in Kafr Tahla, a small village outside of Cairo. El Saadawi was raised in a large household with eight brothers and sisters.. Nawal El Saadawi is a leading Egyptian feminist, sociologist, medical doctor and militant writer on Arab women's problems. She is one of the most widely translated contemporary Egyptian writers, with her work available in twelve languages. She continues to devote her time to being a writer, journalist and worldwide speaker on women's issues. Her current project is writing her autobiography, laboring over it for 10 hours a day. From 1979-180 El Saadawi was the United Nations Advisor for the Women's Program in Africa (ECA) and the Middle East (ECWA). Later in 1980, as a culmination of the long war she had fought for Egyptian women's social and intellectual freedom, an activity that had closed all avenues of official jobs to her, she was imprisoned under the Sadat regime, for alleged "crimes against the state." El Saadawi stated "I was arrested because I believed Sadat. He said there is democracy and we have a multi-party system and you can criticize. So I started criticizing his policy and I landed in jail." In spite of her imprisonment, El Saadawi continued to fight against oppression. El Saadawi formed the Arab Women's Solidarity Association in 1981. The AWSA was the first legal, independent feminist organization in Egypt. The organization has 500 members locally and more than 2,000 internationally. The Association holds international conferences and seminars, publishes a magazine and has started income-generating projects for women in rural areas. The AWSA was banned in 1991 after criticizing US involvement in the Gulf War, which El Saadawi felt should have been solved among the Arabs. Although she was denied pen and paper, El Saadawi continued to write in prison, using a "stubby black eyebrow pencil" and "a small roll of old and tattered toilet paper." She was released in 1982, and in 1983 she published "Memoirs from the Women's Prison, " in which she continued her bold attacks on the repressive Egyptian government. In the afterword to her memoirs, she notes the corrupt nature of her country's government, the dangers of publishing under such authoritarian conditions and her determination to continue to write the truth In Woman at Point Zero, Nawal El Saadawi describes her experiences as a psychiatrist in Egypt, studying the psychological effects of prison on female prisoners. She states in her introduction that when she was conducting these studies, she had no idea that one day she would be imprisoned by the government. On one visit to Qanatir prison, Nawal meets a doctor who tells her that there is a prisoner there who is truly remarkable. She is awaiting the death penalty for killing a man, but the doctor cannot believe that this woman is capable of killing anyone. He wrote out a request for a pardon, but the condemned woman refused to sign it. Nawal desperately wants to meet with this woman, named Firdaus, but Firdaus keeps refusing to meet with her. Finally, the day before she is to be put to death, Firdaus agrees to meet with Nawal

Colleen McCullough-Robinson

McCullough was born in Wellington, in outback central west New South Wales, in 1937 to James and Laurie McCullough. Her mother was a New Zealander of part-Maori descent. During her childhood, her family moved around a great deal, and she was also “a voracious reader”. Her family eventually settled in Sydney, and she attended Holy Cross College, having a strong interest in the humanities. Colleen McCullough was born in Australia. A neurophysiologist, she established the department of neurophysiology at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. In 1963 she moved to the United Kingdom where she met the chairman of the neurology department at Yale University at the Great Ormond Street hospital in London, who offered her a research associate job at Yale. McCullough spent ten years researching and teaching in the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut. In the late 1970s she settled on Norfolk Island in the Pacific, where she met her husband, Ric Robinson, to whom she has been married since 1983. She now lives in Sydney. Her writing career began with the publication of Tim, followed by The Thorn Birds, a record-breaking international bestseller. She has also written lyrics for musical theater. McCullough's Masters of Rome series includes The First Man in Rome (1990), The Grass Crown (1991), Fortune's Favourites (1993), Caesar's Women (1995), Caesar: Let The Dice Fly, The October Horse (2002), and Antony and Cleopatra (2007) Her other novels include The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet (2008) engendered controversy with her reworking of characters in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”. She died aged 77 in January 2015, on Norfolk Island. Norfolk Island, population ~2000, is a self-governing territory of Australia located between Australia and New Zealand.

The Thorn Birds

The Thorn Birds is a historical novel by Colleen McCullough published in 1977. The novel spans several decades in the history of the Cleary family and is the best-selling book in Australian history. Thorn Birds is a saga about the Cleary family. The main character Paddy Cleary (a farmer), receives a job offer from his wealthy sister and is leaving New Zealand with his family to make a new start in Australia. This will change everyone’s lives. Meggie is the only daughter among the many sons of Paddy and his wife Fiona. As a child she meets the man who will become love of her life: a Catholic priest, Ralph de Brikassart.He helps the Clearys to settle down in Australia and eventually becomes Meggie’s best friend (despite the age difference). As Meggie grows up, her feelings for Ralph change Gathering all her courage, she confesses her love to Ralph, who claims he is a servant of God and Church and shall not leave his path. Although Meggie and Ralph cannot be together, love will find a way into their lives. There is a legend about a bird who sings only once in its life while impaling itself on the thorn tree. The bird dies in pain, singing the most beautiful song in the world. The author has made her characters thorn birds: Fiona (Meggie’s mother) loved only once but had to get married to another against her will. Frank, a family outsider who runs away to become a boxer is later convicted for murder. Father Ralph de Brikassart is torn apart between his forbidden feelings for Meggie and his ambitions for the Church.Justine O’Neill (Meggie’s daughter) is hot-tempered, independent and self-assured but afraid of love and tenderness. Everyone suffers and faces many challenges, taking life lessons with self-confidence, courage, and both moral and physical strength. Whatever happens, the Clearys and their children do not complain: they are proud. Maybe it is for their pride they have to pay, since happiness and sadness always go together in the novel.

2. George Eliot

 Mary Ann Evans was born inNuneaton, Warwickshire, England.She was the third child of Robert Evans (1773–1849) and Christiana Evansnée Pearson, 1788–1836), the daughter of a local mill-owner.

George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Anne Evans, may have been called ugly by the author Henry James, but James also admitted that Eliot was so intelligent that he couldn’t help but fall in love with her. That second part is certainly true: readers have been falling in love with Eliot and her work ever since her first story, “Amos Barton,” was published in 1857. She had previously been a journalist and a translator, but once Eliot began to write novels, she turned fiction on its head with richly textured works such as The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch. Unlike many writers before her, she was interested not so much in what her characters did but how they thought and felt—an interest that paved the way for modern novels that were more experimental than Eliot’s, but perhaps never quite as beautiful.

* When Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede, became a success, several men claimed to have written the book. Eliot was forced to come forward as the rightful author.

* When the reading public discovered that Eliot was a woman, they didn’t know whether to condemn her for being an arrogant woman who thought she could write, or praise her for writing so well.

* For over thirty years, Eliot lived with philosopher George Henry Lewes, although they never married because Lewes was unable to divorce his wife (who had four children with another man, as well as three with Lewes).

* Upon Lewes' death, Eliot married John Cross, a man 20 years younger than her.

* It has been suggested that Herbert Spencer, a famed British philosopher, had an affair with Eliot and then broke up with her. Afterward, he wrote an essay on the repugnancy of ugly women. All of Eliot’s friends knew whom he was writing about.

* British author Virginia Woolf said that Eliot’s Middlemarch was the first novel written for grown-ups.

Adam Bede Adam Bede , the first novel written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1859. It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respected scholar of her time. The novel has remained in print ever since and is used in university studies of 19th-century English literature. [2] [17 The story follows four characters' rural lives in the fictional community of Hayslope—a rural, pastoral and close-knit community in 1799.The novel revolves around a love "rectangle" among beautiful but self-absorbed Hetty Sorrel ; Captain Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who seduces her; Adam Bede, her unacknowledged suitor; and Dinah Morris, Hetty's cousin, a fervent, virtuous and beautiful Methodist lay preacher. Adam is a local carpenter much admired for his integrity and intelligence, in love with Hetty. She is attracted to Arthur, the local squire's charming grandson and heir, and falls in love with him. When Adam interrupts a tryst between them, Adam and Arthur fight. Arthur agrees to give up Hetty and leaves Hayslope to return to his militia. After he leaves, Hetty Sorrel agrees to marry Adam but shortly before their marriage, discovers she is pregnant. In desperation, she leaves in search of Arthur but she cannot find him.Unwilling to return to the village on account of the shame and ostracism she would have to endure, she delivers her baby with the assistance of a friendly woman she encounters. She subsequently abandons the infant in a field but not being able to bear the child's cries, she tries to retrieve the infant. However, she is too late, the infant having already died of exposure. Hetty is caught and tried for child murder. She is found guilty and sentenced to hang. Dinah enters the prison and pledges to stay with Hetty until the end. Her compassion brings about Hetty's contrite confession. When Arthur Donnithorne, on leave from the militia for his grandfather's funeral, hears of her impending execution, he races to the court and has the sentence commuted to transportation. Ultimately, Adam and Dinah, who gradually become aware of their mutual love, marry and live peacefully with his family.

3. J.K. Rowling, J.K. Rowling, (born July 31, 1965, Yate, near Bristol, England), is the famous British author of the worldwide attention gaining Harry Potter series. Her best-selling novels have sold more than 400 million copies and won numerous awards. The books have also been adapted to screen in a series of blockbuster films. Ranked as the twelfth richest woman in the United Kingdom in 2008 with a net worth of US$1 billion, Rowling has risen from rags to riches. Harry Potter upgraded the status of this woman from living on welfare to being a multimillionaire in a short period of just 5 years. Titled the Most Influential Woman in Britain in 2010 by leading magazine editors, J.K Rowling and Harry Potter have become household names globally. Joanne Kathleen Rowling, daughter of Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling was born on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England. She is the elder sister of Dianne Rowling who was born 23 month after Jo. Rowling was fond of writing stories since a very young age; she read her short imaginative stories to her sister, Di. Rowling went to the Wyedean School and College after which she attended the University of Exeter where she obtained a BA degree in French and Classics. Rowling then worked at Amnesty International in London as a researcher and bilingual secretary. Rowling conceived the idea of Harry Potter in 1990 while she waited on a 4 hour delayed train trip from Manchester to London. Her mind was suddenly flooded with ideas about a boy who attended wizardry school. She did not have a pen at that time so she kept thinking about it and immediately sat down to write as soon as she reached her flat in Clapham Junction. Rowling wrote Harry Potter through difficult times of poverty and depression surviving on welfare with her daughter whom she had from a brief marriage in Portugal. She now settled in Edinburg near her sister. The first book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which was renamed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the U.S. edition was published in Britain in June, 1997. The book was a big hit not only among children but also adults. For Rowling, there was no looking back and she published a series of 7 Harry Potter books. In July, 1998, a sequel was published, titled, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The third book in the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was published in December, 1999.With a simultaneous release in UK and USA, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was published on July 8, 2000. This particular novel broke all sales records selling 372,775 copies on the first day of its release in UK and 3 million copies in the first 48 hours in the USA. Although Rowling denied rumors of a writer’s block, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, fifth book the series was released three years later followed by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in July, 2005. The seventh and so far last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in July 2007. Rowling has been accredited by many prestigious awards and also praised for generating an interest in reading amongst young people at a time when they were discarding this valuable hobby. Rowling lives in England with her husband, Dr. Neil Murray and 3 children.

Charlotte Bronte (April 21, 1816 March 31, 1855) was one of three English sisters who had books published in the mid-1800s. Her writing described, with a dramatic force that was entirely new to English fiction, the conflict between love and independence and the struggle of the individual to maintain his or her self-esteem. Charlotte Brontë was born in Thornton in Yorkshire, England, on April 21, 1816, the third of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell's six children. Her father was an Anglican minister who moved the family to Haworth, also in Yorkshire, in 1820 after finding work at a church there. Except for a brief and unhappy period when she attended a religious school—later described in the opening chapters of Charlotte Brontë was born in Thornton in Yorkshire, England, on —most of Charlotte's early education was provided at home by her father. After the early death of her mother, followed by the passing of her two older sisters, Brontë, now nine years old, lived in isolation with her father, aunt, sisters Anne and Emily, and brother Patrick Branwell. With their father not communicating much with them, and having no real contact with the outside world, the children spent their time reading and creating their own imaginary worlds. They recorded the events occurring in these imaginary worlds in miniature writing on tiny sheets of paper. Anne and Emily made up a kingdom called Gondal, while Charlotte and Patrick created the realm of Angria, which was ruled by the Duke of Zamorna. Zamorna's romantic conquests make up the greater part of Charlotte's contributions. He was a character who ruled by strength of will and feeling and easily conquered women—they recognized the evil in him but could not fight their attraction to him. The conflict between this dream world and her everyday life caused Brontë great suffering. Although her life was outwardly calm, she lived out the struggles of her made-up characters in her head. At age fifteen she began to work as a schoolteacher. She and both of her sisters later worked watching over the children of wealthy families. While attending a language school in Brussels, Belgium, in 1843 and 1844, she seems to have fallen in love with a married professor at the school, but she never fully admitted the fact to herself. After returning to Haworth in 1844, Charlotte Brontë became depressed. She was lonely and felt that she lacked the ability to do any creative work. She discovered that both of her sisters had been writing poetry, as she had. They decided to each write a novel and offer all of them together to publishers. Her sisters' novels were accepted for publication, but Charlotte's The Professor based upon her Brussels experience, was rejected. (It was not published until after her death.) However, the publisher offered her friendly criticism and encouraged her to try again. Charlotte Brontë's second novel, Jane Eyre, was published in 1847. It became the most successful book of the year. She hid at first behind the pseudonym (pen, or assumed, writing name) Currer Bell, but later she revealed that she was the author of the book. Of all Brontë's novels, Jane Eyre most clearly shows the traces of her earlier stories about the imaginary Angria in the character of Rochester, with his mysterious waysand shady past. However, the governess, Jane, who loves him, does not surrender to Rochester. Instead she struggles to maintain her dignity and a balance between the opposing forces of passion and her religious beliefs.

During 1848 and 1849, within eight months of each other, Brontë's remaining two sisters and brother died. Despite her grief she managed to finish a new novel, Shirley (1849). It was set in her native Yorkshire during the Luddite industrial riots of 1812, when textile workers whose jobs had been taken over by machines banded together to destroy the machines. Shirley used social issues as a ground for a study of the bold and active heroine and a friend who represents someone with more traditional feminine qualities. In her last completed novel, Villette (1853), Brontë again turned to the Brussels affair, treating it now more directly. Despite her success as a writer, Charlotte Brontë continued to live a quiet life at home in Yorkshire. In 1854 she married Arthur Nicholls, a man who had once worked as an assistant to her father, but she died within a year of their marriage on March 31, 1855.

Helen Fielding (born 1958, 60 y.o.) is an English novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, and a sequence of novels and films beginning with the life of a thirty something singleton in London trying to make sense of life and love. Fielding grew up in Morley, West Yorkshire. Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999) were published in 40 countries and sold more than 15 million copies. The two films of the same name achieved international success. In a survey conducted by The Guardian newspaper, Bridget Jones’s Diary was named as one of the ten novels that best defined the 20th century. In a 2004 poll for the BBC, Fielding was named the 29th most influential person in British culture. In December 2016, the BBC's Woman's Hour included Bridget Jones as one of the seven women who had most influenced British female culture over the last seven decades. In 2014, Fielding was one of twenty writers on The Sunday Times list of Britain's 500 Most Influential and was also featured on the London Evening Standard's 1,000 Most Influential Londoners list. A second Bridget novel Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape and in the US by Alfred A. Knopf in October 2013. It debuted at number one on The Sunday Times bestseller list, and number seven on The New York Times bestseller list. By the time the UK paperback was published on 19 June 2014, sales had reached one million copies. The novel was shortlisted for the 15th Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, nominated in the Popular Fiction category of the National Book Award and has been translated into 32 languages.

Bridget Jones's Diary is a 1996 novel by Helen Fielding. Written in the form of a personal diary, the novel chronicles a year in the life of Bridget Jones, a thirty-something single working woman living in London. She writes about her career, self-image, vices, family, friends, and romantic relationships. FILM ADAPTATION : film adaptation of the novel was released in 2001. The film stars Renée Zellweger (in an Academy Award nominated role) as the eponymous heroine, Hugh Grant as Daniel Cleaver, and Colin Firth as Mark Darcy. It was directed by Sharon Maguire (Helen Fielding's friend who was the inspiration for Shazzer) and the screenplay was written by Fielding, Andrew Davies, and Richard Curtis.

Kathleen (Katherine Mansfield) Mansfield Murry (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a prominent New Zealand modernist short story writer who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. At 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In 1917, she was diagnosed with extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which led to her death at age 34.

Her first printed stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls' High School magazine (the family returned to Wellington proper in 1898), in 1898 and 1899.Her first formally published work appeared the following year in the society magazine New Zealand Graphic and Ladies Journal. After having returned travelling across Europe to London in 1908, Mansfield quickly fell into a bohemian way of life. She published only one story and one poem during her first 15 months there.

WORKS

In a German Pension (1911),

The Aloe (1930),

Anne Frank

During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlnds, Anne Frank received a blank diary as one of her

presents on June 12, 1942, her 13 th birthday. According to the Anne Frank House, the red,

checkered authograph book which Anne used as her diary was actually not a surprise, since she

had chosen it the day before with her father when browsing a bookstore near her home. She

began to write it on June 14, 1942, two days later. On July 5, 1942, Anne’s older sister Margot received an official summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany, and on July 6, Margot and Anne went into hiding with their father Otto and mother Edith. They were joined by Herman van Pels, Otto’s business partner, including his wife Auguste and their teenage son Peter. Their hiding place was in the sealed-off upper rooms of the annex at the back of Otto’s company building in Amsterdam. Otto Frank started his business, named Opecta, in 1933. He was licensed to manufacture and sell pectin, a substance used to make jam. He stopped running his business wh8ile everybody was in hiding. But once he returned, he found his employees running it. The rooms that everybody hid in were concealed behind a movable bookcase in the same building as Opekta. Mrs.van Pels’s dentist, Fritz Pfefer, joined them four months later. In the published version, names were changed: The van Pelses are known as the Van Daans, and Fritz Pfefer as Albert Dussel. With the assistance of a group of Otto Frank’s trusted colleagues, they remained hidden for two years and one month. In August 1944, they were discovered and deported to Nazi camps. They were long thought to have been betrayed, although there are indications that their discovery may have been accidental, that the police raid had actually targeted “ration fraud”. Of the eight people, only Otto Frank, the oldest, survived the war. Anne died when she was 15 years old in Bergen-Belsen, from typhus. The exact date of her death is unknown, and has long been believed to be in early March, a few weeks before the prisoners were liberated by British troops in April 1945. However, new research in 2015 indicated that Anne may have died in February. In manuscript, written on loose sheets of paper, was found strewn on the floor of the hiding place

by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuiji after the family’s arrest, but before their rooms were ransacked

by the Dutch police and the Gestapo. They were kept safe, and given to Otto Frank after the war,

with the original notes, when Anne’s death was confirmed in the autumn of 1945.

The diary is not written in the classic forms of Dear Diary” or as letters to oneself; Anne calls her

diary “Kitty”, so almost all of the letters are written to Kitty. Anne used the above-mentioned

names for her annex-mates in the first volume, from September 25, 1942 until November 13,

when the first notebook ends. It is believed that these names were taken from characters found in

a series of popular Dutch books written by Cissy van Marxveldt. Anne’s already budding literary ambitions were galvanized on 29 March 1944 when she heard a London radio broadcast made by the exiled Dutch Minister for Education, Art, and Science, Gerrit Bolkestein, calling for the preservation of “ordinary documents –a diary, letters … simple everyday material” to create an archive for posterity as testimony to the suffering of civilians during the Nazi occupation. On May 20, 1944, she notes that she started re-drafting her diary with future readers in mind. She expanded entries and standardized them by addressing all of them to Kitty, clarified situations, prepared a list of pseudonyms, and cut scenes she thought would be of little interest or too intimate for general consumption. By the time she started the second existing volume, she as writing only to Kitty.

In his will, Otto Frank bequeathed the original manuscripts to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. The copyright however belongs to the Anne Frank Fonds, a Switzerland-based foundation of Basel which was the sole inheritor of Frank after his death in 1980.

Louisa May Alcott (1832 – 1888) was an American novelist and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women(1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown,which is now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on her father's 33rd birthday. She was the daughter of transcendentalist and educator Amos Bronson Alcott and social worker Abby May and the second of four daughters: Anna Bronson Alcott was the eldest; Elizabeth Sewall Alcott and Abigail May Alcott were the two youngest. The family moved to Boston in 1834,where Alcott's father established an experimental school and joined the Transcendental Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Bronson Alcott's opinions on education and tough views on child-rearing shaped young Alcott's mind with a desire to achieve perfection, a goal of the transcendentalists.His attitudes towards Alcott's wild and independent behavior, and his inability to provide for his family, created conflict between Bronson Alcott and his wife and daughters. Poverty made it necessary for Alcott to go to work at an early age as a teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer. Her sisters also supported the family, working as seamstresses, while their mother took on social work among the Irish immigrants. As an adult, Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly. When the American Civil War broke out, she served as a nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, DC, for six weeks in 1862–1863.[6] She intended to serve three months as a nurse Alcott became even more successful with the first part of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868), a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood with her sisters in Concord, Massachusetts, published by the Roberts Brothers. Part two, or Part Second, also known as Good Wives (1869), followed the March sisters into adulthood and marriage. Little Men (1871) detailed Jo's life at the Plumfield School that she founded with her husband Professor Bhaer at the conclusion of Part Two of Little Women. Jo's Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga".Though Alcott never married, she did take in May's daughter, Louisa, after May's death in 1879 from childbed fever, caring for little "Lulu" until her death. Alcott died of a stroke at age 55 in Boston, on March 6, 1888,[21] two days after her father's death. Lulu, her niece was only 8 years old when Louisa died. Louisa's last known words were "Is it not meningitis?"[23] She is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, near Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, on a hillside now known as "Authors' Ridge"

“LITTLE WOMEN”

Character List

Josephine March - The protagonist of the novel, and the second-oldest March sister. Jo, who wants to be a writer, is based on Louisa May Alcott herself, which makes the story semi-autobiographical. Jo has a temper and a quick tongue, although she works hard to control both. She is a tomboy, and reacts with impatience to the many limitations placed on women and girls. She hates romance in her real life, and wants nothing more than to hold her family together.

Meg March - The oldest March sister. Responsible and kind, Meg mothers her younger sisters. She has a small weakness for luxury and leisure, but the greater part of her is gentle, loving, and morally vigorous.

Beth March - The third March daughter. Beth is very quiet and very virtuous, and she does nothing but try to please others. She adores music and plays the piano very well.

Amy March - The youngest March girl. Amy is an artist who adores visual beauty and has a weakness for pretty possessions. She is given to pouting, fits of temper, and vanity; but she does attempt to improve herself.

Laurie Laurence - The rich boy who lives next door to the Marches. Laurie, whose real name is Theodore Laurence, becomes like a son and brother to the Marches. He is charming, clever, and has a good heart.

Marmee - The March girls’ mother. Marmee is the moral role model for her girls. She counsels them through all of their problems and works hard but happily while her husband is at war.

Mr. March - The March girls’ father and Marmee’s husband. He serves in the Union army as a chaplain. When he returns home, he continues acting as a minister to a nearby parish.

Mr. Brooke - Laurie’s tutor. Mr. Brooke is poor but virtuous.

Frederick Bhaer - A respected professor in Germany who becomes an impoverished language instructor in America. Mr. Bhaer lives in New York, where he meets Jo. He is kind and fatherly.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus(1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poetand philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopherWilliam Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. After Wollstonecraft's death less than a month after her daughter Mary was born, Mary was raised by Godwin, who was able to provide his daughter with a rich, if informal, education, encouraging her to adhere to his own liberal political theories. When Mary was four, her father married a neighbour, with whom, as her stepmother, Mary came to have a troubled relationship.[2][3] In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, Mary and Shelley left for France and travelled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet. In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Mary Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at age 53. Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Mary Shelley’s achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalypticnovel The Last Man (1826), and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–46), support the growing view that Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.

FRANKENSTEIN In a series of letters, Robert Walton, the captain of a ship bound for the North Pole, recounts to his sister back in England the progress of his dangerous mission. Successful early on, the mission is soon interrupted by seas full of impassable ice. Trapped, Walton encounters Victor Frankenstein, who has been traveling by dog-drawn sledge across the ice and is weakened by the cold. Walton takes him aboard ship, helps nurse him back to health, and hears the fantastic tale of the monster that Frankenstein created. Victor first describes his early life in Geneva. At the end of a blissful childhood spent in the company of Elizabeth Lavenza (his cousin in the 1818 edition, his adopted sister in the 1831 edition) and friend Henry Clerval, Victor enters the university of Ingolstadt to study natural philosophy and chemistry. There, he is consumed by the desire to discover the secret of life and, after several years of research, becomes convinced that he has found it. Armed with the knowledge he has long been seeking, Victor spends months feverishly fashioning a creature out of old body parts. One climactic night, in the secrecy of his apartment, he brings his creation to life. When he looks at the monstrosity that he has created, however, the sight horrifies him. After a fitful night of sleep, interrupted by the specter of the monster looming over him, he runs into the streets, eventually wandering in remorse. Victor runs into Henry, who has come to study at the university, and he takes his friend back to his apartment. Though the monster is gone, Victor falls into a feverish illness. Sickened by his horrific deed, Victor prepares to return to Geneva, to his family, and to health. Just before departing Ingolstadt, however, he receives a letter from his father informing him that his youngest brother, William, has been murdered. Grief-stricken, Victor hurries home. While passing through the woods where William was strangled, he catches sight of the monster and becomes convinced that the monster is his brother’s murderer. Arriving in Geneva, Victor finds that Justine Moritz, a kind, gentle girl who had been adopted by the Frankenstein household, has been accused. She is tried, condemned, and executed, despite her assertions of innocence. Victor grows despondent, guilty with the knowledge that the monster he has created bears responsibility for the death of two innocent loved ones. Hoping to ease his grief, Victor takes a vacation to the mountains. While he is alone one day, crossing an enormous glacier, the monster approaches him. The monster admits to the murder of William but begs for understanding. Lonely, shunned, and forlorn, he says that he struck out at William in a desperate attempt to injure Victor, his cruel creator. The monster begs Victor to create a mate for him, a monster equally grotesque to serve as his sole companion. Victor refuses at first, horrified by the prospect of creating a second monster. The monster is eloquent and persuasive, however, and he eventually convinces Victor. After returning to Geneva, Victor heads for England, accompanied by Henry, to gather information for the creation of a female monster. Leaving Henry in Scotland, he secludes himself on a desolate island in the Orkneys and works reluctantly at repeating his first success. One night, struck by doubts about the morality of his actions, Victor glances out the window to see the monster glaring in at him with a frightening grin. Horrified by the possible consequences of his work, Victor destroys his new creation. The monster, enraged, vows revenge, swearing that he will be with Victor on Victor’s wedding night. Later that night, Victor takes a boat out onto a lake and dumps the remains of the second creature in the water. The wind picks up and prevents him from returning to the island. In the morning, he finds himself ashore near an unknown town. Upon landing, he is arrested and informed that he will be tried for a murder discovered the previous night. Victor denies any knowledge of the murder, but when shown the body, he is shocked to behold his friend Henry Clerval, with the mark of the monster’s fingers on his neck. Victor falls ill, raving and feverish, and is kept in prison until his recovery, after which he is acquitted of the crime. Shortly after returning to Geneva with his father, Victor marries Elizabeth. He fears the monster’s warning and suspects that he will be murdered on his wedding night. To be cautious, he sends Elizabeth away to wait for him. While he awaits the monster, he hears Elizabeth scream and realizes that the monster had been hinting at killing his new bride, not himself. Victor returns home to his father, who dies of grief a short time later. Victor vows to devote the rest of his life to finding the monster and exacting his revenge, and he soon departs to begin his quest. Victor tracks the monster ever northward into the ice. In a dogsled chase, Victor almost catches up with the monster, but the sea beneath them swells and the ice breaks, leaving an unbridgeable gap between them. At this point, Walton encounters Victor, and the narrative catches up to the time of Walton’s fourth letter to his sister. Walton tells the remainder of the story in another series of letters to his sister. Victor, already ill when the two men meet, worsens and dies shortly thereafter. When Walton returns, several days later, to the room in which the body lies, he is startled to see the monster weeping over Victor. The monster tells Walton of his immense solitude, suffering, hatred, and remorse. He asserts that now that his creator has died, he too can end his suffering. The monster then departs for the northernmost ice to die.

Meg Cabot (born Meggin Patricia Cabot; February 1, 1967) is an American author of romantic and paranormal fiction for teens and adults. She has written and published over fifty books, and is best known for The Princess Diaries, later made by Walt Disney Pictures into two feature films of the same name. Meg's books have been the recipients of numerous awards.

PRINCESS DIARIES Mia Thermopolis is a 14 year old girl, living in Manhattan. Her parents have broken up, she is 5 feet 9 inches tall, isn’t particularly pretty, unpopular and has never had a boyfriend. She thinks that is unusual. But one day, her dad comes for a visit to tell her some life-changing news. She is a princess! Mia thinks that she is the most unfit person in the whole world to be a princess and doesn’t want to be one at all, but she hasn’t got a choice. She desperately wants it to be a secret because if everyone knew, it would make life at school even worse. How long will it be hidden ? The Princess Diaries is written in the form of a diary of a 14-year-old girl where she expresses her intimate thoughts, feelings dreams and desires. The main character – Mia Thermopolis – lives with her artist mom Helen and her cat, Fat Louis, in New York City. She’s a typical teenager who’s got a lot problems: she’s unpopular at school, she looks like a freak, she’s got huge feet, she’s flunking Algebra, no boy has ever asked her out on a date. Then her mom starts dating Mia’s Algebra teacher. And above all – Mia’s dad comes from a make-up European country called Genovia and tells Mia that he’s not just a famous politician but the Prince of Genovia and Mia is a princess and his only heir to the throne. Some teenage girls dream of being a princess and would be glad to hear such news. But Mia is shocked. She’s shy and timid. She’s unwilling to change her life. For Mia, being a princess is just another problem she has to deal with and solve. Mia’s dream is to join Greenpeace and save whales from danger. She also wants to look like her classmate Lana Weinberger who is very beautiful and dates Josh Richter, the best-looking boy in the school. Mia’s dad, Philip Renaldo, reaches an agreement with her. According to it, Mia will become the ruler of Genovia when he dies. Mia will also have to attend special princess lessons and to learn how to behave like a princess. The lessons will be given by Grandmere, who is a bit scary and very extravagant. Mia does her best, overcomes different problems and at the end of the book she finds her love and feels peaceful and happy. The book shows how to stay true to yourself, your friends and your family even if your world is turned upside down. Mia has courage to face great, unexpected and even unbelievable changes in her life. She reveals her best qualities – honesty, kindness, sincerity. The book is realistic and romantic at the same time. It’s about friendship and betrayal, about complicated relations at school and in the family. It reminds the reader that love, compassion, sympathy are the most precious things in life. It’s a girly book. I gave it to some boys to read. I simply wanted them to read something in English. I was a bit surprised when they read the whole Princess Diaries series and enjoyed it! Modern boys also have romantic feelings and dream of kind and understanding girls. I think this funny and entertaining book is worth reading.

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow, the daughter of Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor of Fine Art at the University of Moscow, who later founded the Alexander III Museum (known from 1937 as the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts). Tsvetaeva's mother, Maria Alexandrovna Meyn, Ivan's second wife, was a concert pianist, highly literate, with German and Polish ancestry. Growing up in considerable material comfort, Tsvetaeva would later come to identify herself with the Polish aristocracy. In 1902 Tsvetaeva's mother contracted tuberculosis. A change in climate was believed to help cure the disease, and so the family travelled abroad until shortly before her death in 1906, when Tsvetaeva was 14. They lived for a while by the sea at Nervi, near Genoa. She began spending time at Voloshin's home in the Black Sea resort of Koktebel("Blue Height"), which was a well-known haven for writers, poets and artists.She became enamoured of the work of Aleksandr Blok and Anna Akhmatova, although she never met Blok and did not meet Akhmatova until the 1940s. Tsvetaeva's poetry was admired by poets such as Valery Bryusov, Maximilian Voloshin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Anna Akhmatova. Later, that recognition was also expressed by the poet Joseph Brodsky, pre-eminent among Tsvetaeva's champions.

POETRY

Tsvetaeva's lyric poems fill ten collections; the uncollected lyrics would add at least another volume. Her first two collections indicate their subject matter in their titles: Evening Album (Vechernii al'bom, 1910) and The Magic Lantern (Volshebnyi fonar', 1912). The poems are vignettes of a tranquil childhood and youth in a professorial, middle-class home in Moscow, and display considerable grasp of the formal elements of style. The full range of Tsvetaeva's talent developed quickly, and was undoubtedly influenced by the contacts she had made at Koktebel, and was made evident in two new collections: Mileposts(Versty, 1921) and Mileposts: Book One (Versty, Vypusk I, 1922). Three elements of Tsvetaeva's mature style emerge in the Mileposts collections. First, Tsvetaeva dates her poems and publishes them chronologically. The poems in Mileposts: Book One, for example, were written in 1916 and resolve themselves as a versified journal. Secondly, there are cycles of poems which fall into a regular chronological sequence among the single poems, evidence that certain themes demanded further expression and development. One cycle announces the theme of Mileposts: Book One as a whole: the "Poems of Moscow." Two other cycles are dedicated to poets, the "Poems to Akhmatova" and the "Poems to Blok", which again reappear in a separate volume, Poems to Blok (Stikhi k Bloku, 1922). Thirdly, the Mileposts collections demonstrate the dramatic quality of Tsvetaeva's work, and her ability to assume the guise of multiple dramatis personae within them. The collection Separation (Razluka, 1922) was to contain Tsvetaeva's first long verse narrative, "On a Red Steed" ("Na krasnom kone"). The poem is a prologue to three more verse-narratives written between 1920 and 1922. All four narrative poems draw on folkloric plots. Tsvetaeva acknowledges her sources in the titles of the very long works, The Maiden Tsar: A Fairy-tale Poem (Tsar'-devitsa: Poema-skazka, 1922) and "The Swain", subtitled "A Fairytale" ("Molodets: skazka", 1924). The fourth folklore-style poem is "Byways" ("Pereulochki", published in 1923 in the collection Remeslo), and it is the first poem which may be deemed incomprehensible in that it is fundamentally a soundscape of language. The collection Psyche(Psikheya, 1923) contains one of Tsvetaeva's best-known cycles "Insomnia" (Bessonnitsa) and the poem The Swans' Encampment (Lebedinyi stan, Stikhi 1917-1921, published in 1957) which celebrates the White Army.

 The topic of hell

Tsvetaeva was so infatuated by the subject that she was looking for the topic in other poets writings and even used their lines as a base for her narrative,[22] for example: Two suns are growing cool, O God have mercy! One in heaven in one in my breast. How these suns - will I ever forgive myself? - How these suns used to drive me wild [with love]! And both are growing cool, their rays no longer hurt. And the more ardent one the first too cool.

— Frantz Shubert, Die Nebensonnen, Die Wintereise

Emigrant

Subsequently, as an émigré, Tsvetaeva's last two collections of lyrics were published by émigré presses, Craft (Remeslo, 1923) in Berlin and After Russia (Posle Rossii, 1928) in Paris. There then followed the twenty-three lyrical "Berlin" poems, the pantheistic "Trees" ("Derev'ya"), "Wires" ("Provoda") and "Pairs" ("Dvoe"), and the tragic "Poets" ("Poety"). "After Russia" contains the poem "In Praise of the Rich", in which Tsvetaeva's oppositional tone is merged with her proclivity for ruthless satire. Eschatological topics In 1924, Tsvetaeva wrote "Poem of the End", which details a walk around Prague and across its bridges; the walk is about the final walk she will take with her lover Konstantin Rodzevich. In it everything is foretold: in the first few lines (translated by Elaine Feinstein) the future is already written:

A single post, a point of rusting

tin in the sky

marks the fated place we

move to, he and I

Again, further poems foretell future developments. Principal among these is the voice of the classically oriented Tsvetaeva heard in cycles "The Sibyl," "Phaedra," and "Ariadne." Tsvetaeva's beloved, ill-starred heroines recur in two verse plays, Theseus-Ariadne (Tezei-Ariadna, 1927) and Phaedra (Fedra, 1928). These plays form the first two parts of an incomplete trilogy Aphrodite's Rage.

Satire

The satirist in Tsvetaeva plays second fiddle only to the poet-lyricist. Several satirical poems, moreover, are among Tsvetaeva's best-known works: "The Train of Life" ("Poezd zhizni") and "The Floorcleaners' Song" ("Poloterskaya"), both included in After Russia, and The Rat-Catcher (Krysolov, 1925–1926), a long, folkloric narrative. The target of Tsvetaeva's satire is everything petty and petty bourgeois. Unleashed against such dull creature comforts is the vengeful, unearthly energy of workers both manual and creative. In her notebook, Tsvetaeva writes of "The Floorcleaners' Song": "Overall movement: the floorcleaners ferret out a house's hidden things, they scrub a fire into the door... What do they flush out? Coziness, warmth, tidiness, order... Smells: incense, piety. Bygones. Yesterday... The growing force of their threat is far stronger than the climax." The poem which Tsvetaeva describes as liricheskaia satira, The Rat-Catcher, is loosely based on the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The Rat-Catcher, which is also known as The Pied Piper, is considered by some to be the finest of Tsvetaeva's work. It was also partially an act of homage to Heinrich Heine's poem Die Wanderratten. The Rat-Catcher appeared initially, in serial format, in the émigré journal Volia Rossii in 1925-1926 whilst still being written. It was not to appear in the Soviet Union until after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1956. Its hero is the Pied Piper of Hamelin who saves a town from hordes of rats and then leads the town's children away too, in retribution for the citizens' ingratitude. As in the other folkloric narratives, The Rat-Catcher's story line emerges indirectly through numerous speaking voices which shift from invective, to extended lyrical flights, to pathos. Tsvetaeva's last ten years of exile, from 1928 when "After Russia" appeared until her return in 1939 to the Soviet Union, were principally a "prose decade", though this would almost certainly be by dint of economic necessity rather than one of choice.

1. Harriet Beecher Stowe was a world-renowned American writer, staunch abolitionist and one of the most influential women of the 19th century. Although she wrote dozens of books, essays and articles during her lifetime, she was best known for her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin Or, Life Among the Lowly, which brought unprecedented light to the plight of slaves and, many historians believe, helped incite the American Civil War.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin tells the story of Tom, an honorable, unselfish slave who’s taken from his wife and children to be sold at auction. On a slave transport ship, he saves the life of Eva, a white girl from a wealthy family. Eva’s father purchases Tom, and Tom and Eva become good friends. In the meantime, Eliza – another slave from the same plantation as Tom – learns of plans to sell her son George. Eliza escapes the plantation with George, but they’re hunted down by a slave catcher whose views on slavery are eventually changed by Quakers. Eva becomes ill and, on her deathbed, asks her father to free his slaves. He agrees but is killed before he can, and Tom is sold to a ruthless new owner who employs violence and coercion to keep his slaves in line. After helping two slaves escape, Tom is beaten to death for not revealing their whereabouts. Throughout his life, he clings to his steadfast Christian faith, even as he lay dying. Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s strong Christian message reflected Stowe’s belief that slavery and the Christian doctrine were at odds; in her eyes, slavery was clearly a sin. The book was first published in serial form (1851-1852) as a group of sketches in the National Era and then as a two-volume novel. The book sold 10,000 copies the first week. Over the next year, it sold 300,000 copies in America and over one million copies in Britain. Stowe became an overnight success and went on tour in the United States and Britain promoting Uncle Tom’s Cabin and her abolitionist views. But it was considered unbecoming for women of Stowe’s era to speak publicly to large audiences of men. So, despite her fame, she seldom spoke about the book in public, even at events held in her honor. Instead, Calvin or one of her brothers spoke for her. Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought slavery into the limelight like never before, especially in the northern states. Its characters and their daily experiences made people uncomfortable as they realized slaves had families and hopes and dreams like everyone else, yet were considered chattel and exposed to terrible living conditions and violence. It made slavery personal and relatable instead of just some “peculiar institution” in the South. It also sparked outrage. In the North, the book stoked anti-slavery views. According to The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Frederick Douglasscelebrated that Stowe had “baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared nothing for the bleeding slave.” Abolitionists grew from a relatively small, outspoken group to a large and potent political force. But in the South, Uncle Tom’s Cabin infuriated slave owners who preferred to keep the darker side of slavery to themselves. They felt attacked and misrepresented – despite Stowe’s including benevolent slave owners in the book – and stubbornly held tight to their belief that slavery was an economic necessity and slaves were inferior people incapable of taking care of themselves. 2. Pippi Longstocking is the main character in an eponymous series of children's books by the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. Pippi was named by Lindgren's daughter Karin, then nine years old like Pippi, who asked her mother for a get-well story when she was off school. Pippi is red-haired, freckled, unconventional and superhumanly strong – able to lift her horse one-handed. She is playful and unpredictable. She often makes fun of unreasonable adults, especially if they are pompous and condescending. Her anger comes out in extreme cases, such as when a man ill-treats his horse. Pippi, like Peter Pan, does not want to grow up. She is the daughter of a buccaneer captain and has adventure stories to tell about that too. Her four best friends are her horse and monkey, and the neighbours' children, Tommy and Annika. After being rejected by Bonnier Publishers in 1944, Lindgren's first manuscript was accepted by Rabén and Sjögren. The first three Pippi chapter books were published in 1945–48, followed by three short stories and a number of picture book adaptations. They have been translated into 76 languages (2018)and made into several films and television series. Pippi Longstocking is a fictional nine-year-old girl. She moves into Villa Villekulla, her house that she shares with her monkey named Mr. Nillson and her horse, and quickly befriends the two children living next door, Tommy and Annika Settergren.With her suitcase of gold coins, she maintains an independent lifestyle without her parents: her mother died soon after her birth, and her father, Captain Ephraim Longstocking, is first missing at sea, and then, king of a South Sea island.Despite periodic attempts by village authorities to make her conform to cultural expectations of what a child's life should be, such as unsuccessfully sending her to school, Pippi happily lives free from social conventions.According to Eva-Maria Metcalf, Pippi "loves her freckles and her tattered clothes and makes not the slightest attempt to suppress her wild imagination or to adopt good manners." She has a penchant for storytelling, which often takes the form of tall tales.When discussing Pippi, Astrid Lindgren explained that "Pippi represents my own childish longing for a person who has power but does not abuse it. And pay attention to the fact that Pippi never does that." Although she is the self-proclaimed "strongest girl in the world," Pippi often uses nonviolence to solve conflicts or protect other children from bullying. Pippi has been variously described by literary critics as "warm-hearted," compassionate,kind clever, generous, playful, and witty to the point of besting adult characters in conversation. Laura Hoffeld wrote that while Pippi's "naturalness entails selfishness, ignorance, and a marked propensity to lie," the character "is simultaneously generous, quick and wise, and true to herself and others."

3. Dame Iris Murdoch, original name in full Jean Iris Murdoch, married name Mrs. John O. Bayley, (born July 15, 1919, Dublin, Ireland—died February 8, 1999, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England), British novelist and philosopher noted for her psychological novels that contain philosophical and comic elements. After an early childhood spent in London, Murdoch went to Badminton School, Bristol, and from 1938 to 1942 studied at Somerville College, Oxford. Between 1942 and 1944 she worked in the British Treasury and then for two years as an administrative officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. In 1948 she was elected a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Murdoch’s first published work was a critical study, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953). This was followed by two novels, Under the Net (1954) and The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), that were admired for their intelligence, wit, and high seriousness. These qualities, along with a rich comic sense and a gift for analyzing the tensions and complexities in sophisticated sexual relationships, continued to distinguish her work. With what is perhaps her finest book, The Bell (1958), Murdoch began to attain wide recognition as a novelist. She went on to a highly prolific career with such novels as A Severed Head (1961), The Red and the Green (1965), The Nice and the Good (1968), The Black Prince (1973), Henry and Cato (1976), The Sea, the Sea (1978, Booker Prize), The Philosopher’s Pupil(1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The Message to the Planet(1989), and The Green Knight (1993). Murdoch’s last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), was not well received; some critics attributed the novel’s flaws to the Alzheimer’s disease with which she had been diagnosed in 1994. Murdoch’s husband, the novelist John Bayley, chronicled her struggle with the disease in his memoir, Elegy for Iris (1999). A selection of her voluminous correspondence was published as Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995 (2016). Murdoch’s novels typically have convoluted plots in which innumerable characters representing different philosophical positions undergo kaleidoscopic changes in their relations with each other. Realistic observations of 20th-century life among middle-class professionals are interwoven with extraordinary incidents that partake of the macabre, the grotesque, and the wildly comic. The novels illustrate Murdoch’s conviction that although human beings think they are free to exercise rational control over their lives and behaviour, they are actually at the mercy of the unconscious mind, the determining effects of society at large, and other, more inhuman, forces. In addition to producing novels, Murdoch wrote plays, verse, and works of philosophy and literary criticism.

4. Nawal El Saadawi was born in 1931 in Kafr Tahla, a small village outside of Cairo. El Saadawi was raised in a large household with eight brothers and sisters.. Nawal El Saadawi is a leading Egyptian feminist, sociologist, medical doctor and militant writer on Arab women's problems. She is one of the most widely translated contemporary Egyptian writers, with her work available in twelve languages. She continues to devote her time to being a writer, journalist and worldwide speaker on women's issues. Her current project is writing her autobiography, laboring over it for 10 hours a day. From 1979-180 El Saadawi was the United Nations Advisor for the Women's Program in Africa (ECA) and the Middle East (ECWA). Later in 1980, as a culmination of the long war she had fought for Egyptian women's social and intellectual freedom, an activity that had closed all avenues of official jobs to her, she was imprisoned under the Sadat regime, for alleged "crimes against the state." El Saadawi stated "I was arrested because I believed Sadat. He said there is democracy and we have a multi-party system and you can criticize. So I started criticizing his policy and I landed in jail." In spite of her imprisonment, El Saadawi continued to fight against oppression. El Saadawi formed the Arab Women's Solidarity Association in 1981. The AWSA was the first legal, independent feminist organization in Egypt. The organization has 500 members locally and more than 2,000 internationally. The Association holds international conferences and seminars, publishes a magazine and has started income-generating projects for women in rural areas. The AWSA was banned in 1991 after criticizing US involvement in the Gulf War, which El Saadawi felt should have been solved among the Arabs. Although she was denied pen and paper, El Saadawi continued to write in prison, using a "stubby black eyebrow pencil" and "a small roll of old and tattered toilet paper." She was released in 1982, and in 1983 she published "Memoirs from the Women's Prison, " in which she continued her bold attacks on the repressive Egyptian government. In the afterword to her memoirs, she notes the corrupt nature of her country's government, the dangers of publishing under such authoritarian conditions and her determination to continue to write the truth In Woman at Point Zero, Nawal El Saadawi describes her experiences as a psychiatrist in Egypt, studying the psychological effects of prison on female prisoners. She states in her introduction that when she was conducting these studies, she had no idea that one day she would be imprisoned by the government. On one visit to Qanatir prison, Nawal meets a doctor who tells her that there is a prisoner there who is truly remarkable. She is awaiting the death penalty for killing a man, but the doctor cannot believe that this woman is capable of killing anyone. He wrote out a request for a pardon, but the condemned woman refused to sign it. Nawal desperately wants to meet with this woman, named Firdaus, but Firdaus keeps refusing to meet with her. Finally, the day before she is to be put to death, Firdaus agrees to meet with Nawal

Colleen McCullough-Robinson

McCullough was born in Wellington, in outback central west New South Wales, in 1937 to James and Laurie McCullough. Her mother was a New Zealander of part-Maori descent. During her childhood, her family moved around a great deal, and she was also “a voracious reader”. Her family eventually settled in Sydney, and she attended Holy Cross College, having a strong interest in the humanities. Colleen McCullough was born in Australia. A neurophysiologist, she established the department of neurophysiology at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. In 1963 she moved to the United Kingdom where she met the chairman of the neurology department at Yale University at the Great Ormond Street hospital in London, who offered her a research associate job at Yale. McCullough spent ten years researching and teaching in the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut. In the late 1970s she settled on Norfolk Island in the Pacific, where she met her husband, Ric Robinson, to whom she has been married since 1983. She now lives in Sydney. Her writing career began with the publication of Tim, followed by The Thorn Birds, a record-breaking international bestseller. She has also written lyrics for musical theater. McCullough's Masters of Rome series includes The First Man in Rome (1990), The Grass Crown (1991), Fortune's Favourites (1993), Caesar's Women (1995), Caesar: Let The Dice Fly, The October Horse (2002), and Antony and Cleopatra (2007) Her other novels include The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet (2008) engendered controversy with her reworking of characters in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”. She died aged 77 in January 2015, on Norfolk Island. Norfolk Island, population ~2000, is a self-governing territory of Australia located between Australia and New Zealand.

The Thorn Birds

The Thorn Birds is a historical novel by Colleen McCullough published in 1977. The novel spans several decades in the history of the Cleary family and is the best-selling book in Australian history. Thorn Birds is a saga about the Cleary family. The main character Paddy Cleary (a farmer), receives a job offer from his wealthy sister and is leaving New Zealand with his family to make a new start in Australia. This will change everyone’s lives. Meggie is the only daughter among the many sons of Paddy and his wife Fiona. As a child she meets the man who will become love of her life: a Catholic priest, Ralph de Brikassart.He helps the Clearys to settle down in Australia and eventually becomes Meggie’s best friend (despite the age difference). As Meggie grows up, her feelings for Ralph change Gathering all her courage, she confesses her love to Ralph, who claims he is a servant of God and Church and shall not leave his path. Although Meggie and Ralph cannot be together, love will find a way into their lives. There is a legend about a bird who sings only once in its life while impaling itself on the thorn tree. The bird dies in pain, singing the most beautiful song in the world. The author has made her characters thorn birds: Fiona (Meggie’s mother) loved only once but had to get married to another against her will. Frank, a family outsider who runs away to become a boxer is later convicted for murder. Father Ralph de Brikassart is torn apart between his forbidden feelings for Meggie and his ambitions for the Church.Justine O’Neill (Meggie’s daughter) is hot-tempered, independent and self-assured but afraid of love and tenderness. Everyone suffers and faces many challenges, taking life lessons with self-confidence, courage, and both moral and physical strength. Whatever happens, the Clearys and their children do not complain: they are proud. Maybe it is for their pride they have to pay, since happiness and sadness always go together in the novel.

2. George Eliot

 Mary Ann Evans was born inNuneaton, Warwickshire, England.She was the third child of Robert Evans (1773–1849) and Christiana Evansnée Pearson, 1788–1836), the daughter of a local mill-owner.

George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Anne Evans, may have been called ugly by the author Henry James, but James also admitted that Eliot was so intelligent that he couldn’t help but fall in love with her. That second part is certainly true: readers have been falling in love with Eliot and her work ever since her first story, “Amos Barton,” was published in 1857. She had previously been a journalist and a translator, but once Eliot began to write novels, she turned fiction on its head with richly textured works such as The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch. Unlike many writers before her, she was interested not so much in what her characters did but how they thought and felt—an interest that paved the way for modern novels that were more experimental than Eliot’s, but perhaps never quite as beautiful.

* When Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede, became a success, several men claimed to have written the book. Eliot was forced to come forward as the rightful author.

* When the reading public discovered that Eliot was a woman, they didn’t know whether to condemn her for being an arrogant woman who thought she could write, or praise her for writing so well.

* For over thirty years, Eliot lived with philosopher George Henry Lewes, although they never married because Lewes was unable to divorce his wife (who had four children with another man, as well as three with Lewes).

* Upon Lewes' death, Eliot married John Cross, a man 20 years younger than her.

* It has been suggested that Herbert Spencer, a famed British philosopher, had an affair with Eliot and then broke up with her. Afterward, he wrote an essay on the repugnancy of ugly women. All of Eliot’s friends knew whom he was writing about.

* British author Virginia Woolf said that Eliot’s Middlemarch was the first novel written for grown-ups.

Adam Bede Adam Bede , the first novel written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1859. It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respected scholar of her time. The novel has remained in print ever since and is used in university studies of 19th-century English literature. [2] [17 The story follows four characters' rural lives in the fictional community of Hayslope—a rural, pastoral and close-knit community in 1799.The novel revolves around a love "rectangle" among beautiful but self-absorbed Hetty Sorrel ; Captain Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who seduces her; Adam Bede, her unacknowledged suitor; and Dinah Morris, Hetty's cousin, a fervent, virtuous and beautiful Methodist lay preacher. Adam is a local carpenter much admired for his integrity and intelligence, in love with Hetty. She is attracted to Arthur, the local squire's charming grandson and heir, and falls in love with him. When Adam interrupts a tryst between them, Adam and Arthur fight. Arthur agrees to give up Hetty and leaves Hayslope to return to his militia. After he leaves, Hetty Sorrel agrees to marry Adam but shortly before their marriage, discovers she is pregnant. In desperation, she leaves in search of Arthur but she cannot find him.Unwilling to return to the village on account of the shame and ostracism she would have to endure, she delivers her baby with the assistance of a friendly woman she encounters. She subsequently abandons the infant in a field but not being able to bear the child's cries, she tries to retrieve the infant. However, she is too late, the infant having already died of exposure. Hetty is caught and tried for child murder. She is found guilty and sentenced to hang. Dinah enters the prison and pledges to stay with Hetty until the end. Her compassion brings about Hetty's contrite confession. When Arthur Donnithorne, on leave from the militia for his grandfather's funeral, hears of her impending execution, he races to the court and has the sentence commuted to transportation. Ultimately, Adam and Dinah, who gradually become aware of their mutual love, marry and live peacefully with his family.

3. J.K. Rowling, J.K. Rowling, (born July 31, 1965, Yate, near Bristol, England), is the famous British author of the worldwide attention gaining Harry Potter series. Her best-selling novels have sold more than 400 million copies and won numerous awards. The books have also been adapted to screen in a series of blockbuster films. Ranked as the twelfth richest woman in the United Kingdom in 2008 with a net worth of US$1 billion, Rowling has risen from rags to riches. Harry Potter upgraded the status of this woman from living on welfare to being a multimillionaire in a short period of just 5 years. Titled the Most Influential Woman in Britain in 2010 by leading magazine editors, J.K Rowling and Harry Potter have become household names globally. Joanne Kathleen Rowling, daughter of Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling was born on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England. She is the elder sister of Dianne Rowling who was born 23 month after Jo. Rowling was fond of writing stories since a very young age; she read her short imaginative stories to her sister, Di. Rowling went to the Wyedean School and College after which she attended the University of Exeter where she obtained a BA degree in French and Classics. Rowling then worked at Amnesty International in London as a researcher and bilingual secretary. Rowling conceived the idea of Harry Potter in 1990 while she waited on a 4 hour delayed train trip from Manchester to London. Her mind was suddenly flooded with ideas about a boy who attended wizardry school. She did not have a pen at that time so she kept thinking about it and immediately sat down to write as soon as she reached her flat in Clapham Junction. Rowling wrote Harry Potter through difficult times of poverty and depression surviving on welfare with her daughter whom she had from a brief marriage in Portugal. She now settled in Edinburg near her sister. The first book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which was renamed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the U.S. edition was published in Britain in June, 1997. The book was a big hit not only among children but also adults. For Rowling, there was no looking back and she published a series of 7 Harry Potter books. In July, 1998, a sequel was published, titled, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The third book in the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was published in December, 1999.With a simultaneous release in UK and USA, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was published on July 8, 2000. This particular novel broke all sales records selling 372,775 copies on the first day of its release in UK and 3 million copies in the first 48 hours in the USA. Although Rowling denied rumors of a writer’s block, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, fifth book the series was released three years later followed by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in July, 2005. The seventh and so far last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in July 2007. Rowling has been accredited by many prestigious awards and also praised for generating an interest in reading amongst young people at a time when they were discarding this valuable hobby. Rowling lives in England with her husband, Dr. Neil Murray and 3 children.

Charlotte Bronte (April 21, 1816 March 31, 1855) was one of three English sisters who had books published in the mid-1800s. Her writing described, with a dramatic force that was entirely new to English fiction, the conflict between love and independence and the struggle of the individual to maintain his or her self-esteem. Charlotte Brontë was born in Thornton in Yorkshire, England, on April 21, 1816, the third of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell's six children. Her father was an Anglican minister who moved the family to Haworth, also in Yorkshire, in 1820 after finding work at a church there. Except for a brief and unhappy period when she attended a religious school—later described in the opening chapters of Charlotte Brontë was born in Thornton in Yorkshire, England, on —most of Charlotte's early education was provided at home by her father. After the early death of her mother, followed by the passing of her two older sisters, Brontë, now nine years old, lived in isolation with her father, aunt, sisters Anne and Emily, and brother Patrick Branwell. With their father not communicating much with them, and having no real contact with the outside world, the children spent their time reading and creating their own imaginary worlds. They recorded the events occurring in these imaginary worlds in miniature writing on tiny sheets of paper. Anne and Emily made up a kingdom called Gondal, while Charlotte and Patrick created the realm of Angria, which was ruled by the Duke of Zamorna. Zamorna's romantic conquests make up the greater part of Charlotte's contributions. He was a character who ruled by strength of will and feeling and easily conquered women—they recognized the evil in him but could not fight their attraction to him. The conflict between this dream world and her everyday life caused Brontë great suffering. Although her life was outwardly calm, she lived out the struggles of her made-up characters in her head. At age fifteen she began to work as a schoolteacher. She and both of her sisters later worked watching over the children of wealthy families. While attending a language school in Brussels, Belgium, in 1843 and 1844, she seems to have fallen in love with a married professor at the school, but she never fully admitted the fact to herself. After returning to Haworth in 1844, Charlotte Brontë became depressed. She was lonely and felt that she lacked the ability to do any creative work. She discovered that both of her sisters had been writing poetry, as she had. They decided to each write a novel and offer all of them together to publishers. Her sisters' novels were accepted for publication, but Charlotte's The Professor based upon her Brussels experience, was rejected. (It was not published until after her death.) However, the publisher offered her friendly criticism and encouraged her to try again. Charlotte Brontë's second novel, Jane Eyre, was published in 1847. It became the most successful book of the year. She hid at first behind the pseudonym (pen, or assumed, writing name) Currer Bell, but later she revealed that she was the author of the book. Of all Brontë's novels, Jane Eyre most clearly shows the traces of her earlier stories about the imaginary Angria in the character of Rochester, with his mysterious waysand shady past. However, the governess, Jane, who loves him, does not surrender to Rochester. Instead she struggles to maintain her dignity and a balance between the opposing forces of passion and her religious beliefs.

During 1848 and 1849, within eight months of each other, Brontë's remaining two sisters and brother died. Despite her grief she managed to finish a new novel, Shirley (1849). It was set in her native Yorkshire during the Luddite industrial riots of 1812, when textile workers whose jobs had been taken over by machines banded together to destroy the machines. Shirley used social issues as a ground for a study of the bold and active heroine and a friend who represents someone with more traditional feminine qualities. In her last completed novel, Villette (1853), Brontë again turned to the Brussels affair, treating it now more directly. Despite her success as a writer, Charlotte Brontë continued to live a quiet life at home in Yorkshire. In 1854 she married Arthur Nicholls, a man who had once worked as an assistant to her father, but she died within a year of their marriage on March 31, 1855.

Helen Fielding (born 1958, 60 y.o.) is an English novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, and a sequence of novels and films beginning with the life of a thirty something singleton in London trying to make sense of life and love. Fielding grew up in Morley, West Yorkshire. Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999) were published in 40 countries and sold more than 15 million copies. The two films of the same name achieved international success. In a survey conducted by The Guardian newspaper, Bridget Jones’s Diary was named as one of the ten novels that best defined the 20th century. In a 2004 poll for the BBC, Fielding was named the 29th most influential person in British culture. In December 2016, the BBC's Woman's Hour included Bridget Jones as one of the seven women who had most influenced British female culture over the last seven decades. In 2014, Fielding was one of twenty writers on The Sunday Times list of Britain's 500 Most Influential and was also featured on the London Evening Standard's 1,000 Most Influential Londoners list. A second Bridget novel Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape and in the US by Alfred A. Knopf in October 2013. It debuted at number one on The Sunday Times bestseller list, and number seven on The New York Times bestseller list. By the time the UK paperback was published on 19 June 2014, sales had reached one million copies. The novel was shortlisted for the 15th Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, nominated in the Popular Fiction category of the National Book Award and has been translated into 32 languages.

Bridget Jones's Diary is a 1996 novel by Helen Fielding. Written in the form of a personal diary, the novel chronicles a year in the life of Bridget Jones, a thirty-something single working woman living in London. She writes about her career, self-image, vices, family, friends, and romantic relationships. FILM ADAPTATION : film adaptation of the novel was released in 2001. The film stars Renée Zellweger (in an Academy Award nominated role) as the eponymous heroine, Hugh Grant as Daniel Cleaver, and Colin Firth as Mark Darcy. It was directed by Sharon Maguire (Helen Fielding's friend who was the inspiration for Shazzer) and the screenplay was written by Fielding, Andrew Davies, and Richard Curtis.

Kathleen (Katherine Mansfield) Mansfield Murry (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a prominent New Zealand modernist short story writer who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. At 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In 1917, she was diagnosed with extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which led to her death at age 34.

Her first printed stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls' High School magazine (the family returned to Wellington proper in 1898), in 1898 and 1899.Her first formally published work appeared the following year in the society magazine New Zealand Graphic and Ladies Journal. After having returned travelling across Europe to London in 1908, Mansfield quickly fell into a bohemian way of life. She published only one story and one poem during her first 15 months there.

WORKS

In a German Pension (1911),


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