Search Results: Titles starting with P from Fay Tsapoga

In Persuasion, her last novel, Jane Austen reveals her most mature dissection of people, place and social setting.
Like the earlier works Persuasion is a tale of love and marriage, told with the irony, insight and just evaluation of human conduct which sets her novels apart. But the heroine - like the author - is more mature; the tone of the writing is more sombre. Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth have met and separated years before. Their reunion forces a recognition of the false values that drove them apart. The characters who embody those values are the subjects of some of the most withering satire that Jane Austen ever wrote.

Few readers have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet. Her early determination to dislike Mr. Darcy - who is quite the most handsome and eligible bachelor in the whole of English literature - is a misjudgement only matched in folly by Darcy's arrogant pride. Their first impressions give way to truer feelings in a comedy profoundly concerned with happiness and how it might be achieved.
Vivien Jones, in her new introduction to this Penguin Classics edition, shows how their romance is inseparable from the important social and political debates of Austen's time, and describes Pride and Prejudice as "One of the most perfect, most pleasurable and most subtle - and therefore, perhaps, mostn dangerously persuasive - of romantic love stories."

Charlotte Bronte's first novel, The Professor, is narrated from the viewpoint of an ambitious and self-made man.
Rejecting his aristocratic inheritance William Crimsworth goes to Brussels to find his fortune. He takes a job teaching at a boarding school for young ladies, where he begins a flirtation with Zoraide Reuter, who, out of jealousy, attempts to frustrate his courtship of Frances Henri, an attractive young woman determined to make her way in the world.
In The Professor Charlotte Bronte holds up to scrutiny the Victorian ideals of self-help and individualism. The result is an unusual love story, and a novel profoundly critical of a society in which the relationships between men and women are reduced to power struggles.