Juliet Stevenson
1) Persuasion
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Persuasion is the story of Anne and Captain Wentworth and their long awaited union. Anne Elliot is a young woman of perfect breeding and unwavering integrity. Austen wrote of her, "She is almost too good for me." The world of country gentry in Regency England serves as a setting while portraying the many aspects of proper society - its failings and humor.
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The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.
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"Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker--a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry's brilliant daughter, Alma (who inherits both her father's money and his mind), ultimately becomes a botanist of considerable...
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On a dark midwinter's night in an ancient inn on the river Thames, a wounded stranger carries in the lifeless body of a small child. Hours later the girl stirs, and returns to life. Is it a miracle? Magic? As the days pass the child remains mute and unable to answer questions. Three families are keen to claim her: the wealthy mother of a kidnapped daughter missing for two years; a farming family sure it is their son's secret daughter; a parson's housekeeper,...
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This Jane Austen tale deals with money and marriage, and how strongly they affect each other. Shy, fragile, Fanny Price is the consummate "poor relation." Sent to live with her wealthy uncle Thomas, she clashes with his spoiled, selfish daughters and falls in love with his son. Their lives are further complicated by the arrival of a pair of witty, sophisticated Londoners whose flair for flirtation collides with the quiet, conservative ways of Mansfield...
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""Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." It's one of the most famous opening lines in literature, that of Virginia Woolf's beloved masterpiece of time, memory, and the city. In the wake of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell- shock and on the brink of madness....
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Northanger Abbey is both a perfectly aimed literary parody and a withering satire of the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century. But most of all, it is the story of the initiation into life of its naïve but sweetly appealing heroine, Catherine Morland, a willing victim of the contemporary craze for Gothic literature who is determined to see herself as the heroine of a dark and thrilling romance....
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"Natalie Jenner, the internationally bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society, returns with a compelling and heartwarming story of post-war London, a century-old bookstore, and three women determined to find their way in a fast-changing world in Bloomsbury Girls. Bloomsbury Books is an old-fashioned new and rare book store that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men and guided by the general manager's unbreakable fifty-one...
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Forced to take in lodgers in economically challenged 1922 South London, widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter find their lives profoundly and disturbingly changed by the arrival of a modern young couple.
It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants,...
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"Jane Start is thirty-three, broke, and recently single. Ten years prior, she had a hit song--written by world-famous superstar Jonesy--but Jane hasn't had a breakout since. Now she's living out of four garbage bags at her parents' house, reduced to performing to Karaoke tracks in Las Vegas. But when her longtime manager Pippa sends Jane to London to regroup, she's seated next to an intriguing stranger on the flight--the other Tom Hardy, an elegantly...
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Explores the reasons why women do not have the same influence, power, and wealth as men do. Meditates on the writer-temperament and explores the need for a woman to have a room of her own and five hundred pounds a year being symbols of the power to think for oneself and contemplate.
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"The never-before-told story of one woman's heroism that changed the course of the Second World War In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent command across France: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of...
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"It is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson--a sensible schoolmarm and lonely spinster--is just trying to get through life. But one day, she reaches her breaking point, abandoning her job and her tidy, circumscribed life, to set out on an expedition to the other side of the world in search of an insect that may or may not exist: the golden beetle of New Caledonia, Margery's childhood obsession ever since her father gave...
17) Belgravia
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On the evening 15 June 1815, the great and the good of British society have gathered in Brussels at what is to become one of the most tragic parties in history -- the Duchess of Richmond's ball. For this is the eve of the Battle of Waterloo, and many of the handsome young men attending the ball will find themselves, the very next day, on the battlefield. For Sophia Trenchard, the young and beautiful daughter of Wellington's chief supplier, this night...
18) House of names
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"A retelling of the story of Clytemnestra and her children from Greek mythology"--
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Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction • A Refinery 29 Favorite Book of the Year • A Booklist Top 10 First Novels of the Year • A People Best Book of the Fall
"Wonderful... completely transporting." —Madeline Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Circe and The Song of Achilles
In 1780s London, a prosperous merchant finds
...20) Noonday: a novel
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"London, the Blitz, Autumn 1940. As the bombs fall on the blacked-out city, ambulance driver Elinor Brooke races from bomb sites to hospitals trying to save the lives of injured survivors, working alongside former friend Kit Neville, while her husband Paul Tarrant works as an air-raide warden. Once fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art before the First World War destroyed the hopes of their generation, they now find themselves caught in...
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