First published in 1897, The Beth Book – Being a Study from the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius, is a semi-autobiographical novel offering a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Grand’s compelling story recounts in vivid detail the childhood of her young heroine, Beth, a spirited and intelligent girl who challenges the limitations of provincial life in Ireland and Yorkshire. Without the benefit of formal education, Beth must make her own way through adolescence, contending with a violent mother and an alcoholic father. With little money to go round, Beth often goes without so that her brothers might be raised as gentlemen, thus giving her an early introduction to sexual inequality. Even in girlhood Beth challenges gender expectations, dressing as a boy and poaching rabbits for the family dinner table. Like Grand herself, Beth makes an early marriage to escape her unhappy childhood, becoming the wife of philandering doctor, Daniel Maclure. Disillusion soon turns to defiance, as Beth recreates herself as a woman of genius, with her rousing refrain of “I shall succeed!” After escaping to a room of her own, Beth becomes a New Woman, setting a high standard both for herself and for other women. Grand’s extraordinary recall of childhood emotions, avoiding Victorian sentimentality, makes The Beth Book a convincing and captivating chronicle of female adolescence. The coming of age and sexual awakening of Beth broadens into a consideration of wider social issues, such as marital violence, vivisection, and the sexual double standard. The Beth Book deserves to be seen as a classic of the Victorian age. This new edition, the first for almost twenty years, includes: A critical introduction by Jenny Bourne Taylor Explanatory footnotes Bibliography Contemporary reviews A selection of other writings by and about Sarah Grand

“A gripping tale of what happens when an author’s world shifts 180 degrees” DAVID NIALL WILSON Bram Stoker Award Author of Deep Blue & The Parting Beth Shepherd is a forty-nine-year-old, twice-divorced, mid-list crime writer whose life is unraveling. Even though she lives in beautiful Santa Cruz, California, she can’t pull herself together. She’s past deadline on her new book, over budget, and her New York agent, Marty Schienman, is applying pressure via hysterical phone calls and emails. Meanwhile, things are bad at home, as her gay son is doing his best to reunite with his deadbeat dad—although even Beth has been feeling pretty “deadbeat” lately. Her fictional NYPD homicide detective, Katie Shields, seems to be turning on her with every new page. Finally, she finds out that her long-time champion Marty is dying of cancer, and it’s all Beth can take. That’s when something unbelievable happens. Katie, a fictional character, hijacks Beth’s mess of a manuscript. She stops existing in fiction-land and gets on the case of her creator, ultimately helping Beth face what she must face from her son’s burgeoning relationship with his dad, to Beth’s relationship with her brothers, to her dealing with Marty’s illness. As Beth gains control of her book and her life, she solves the biggest case of her career.

The Beat movement exploded into American culture in the early 1950s with the force of prophecy. Not just another literary school, it was an artistic and social revolution. William S. Burroughs proclaimed that the Beat writers were “real architects of change. There is no doubt that we’re living in a freer America as a result of the Beat literary movement, which is an important part of the larger picture of cultural and political change in this country during the last forty years, when a four-letter word couldn’t appear on the printed page and minority rights were ridiculous.” Anne Waldman, a renowned poet and longtime friend of many of these writers, has gathered in this volume a range of the best and most exemplary writings of the Beat poets and novelists. Selections from the Beat classics appear, as well as more recent prose and poetry demonstrating the continued vitality of the Beat experiment. Included are short biographies of the contributors, an extensive bibliography of Beat literature, and a unique guide to “Beat places” around the world—from Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, where his novel Dr. Sax takes place, to Tangier, where Burroughs wrote parts of Naked Lunch.

Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis focuses attention to how the residents of smaller cities, provincial districts, rural settings, and colonial outposts have produced, disseminated, and read print materials.

Fab and his friends think they've found the perfect drummer for their rock band in his new neighbor, Zee. But Zee's bizarre behavior and slow, lurching movements seem odd to Lola and Emilio. Fab insists he's just a normal teenager. That is until Fab has a scary encounter with Zee's dad in the woods, and sees Zee act strangely during their first gig. Fab can't help but wonder . . . is his amazing drummer really a zombie? Calico is an imprint of Magic Wagon, a division of ABDO.

This is the first comprehensive study of the Irish writers of the Victorian age, some of them still remembered, most of them now forgotten. Their work was often directed to a British as well as an Irish reading audience and was therefore disparaged in the era of W.B. Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival with its culturally nationalist agenda. This study is based on a reading of around 370 novels by 150 authors, including still-familiar novelists such as William Carleton, the peasant writer who wielded much influence, and Charles Lever, whose serious work was destroyed by the slur of 'rollicking', as well as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, George Moore, Emily Lawless, Somerville and Ross, Bram Stoker, and three of the leading authors from the new-woman movement, Sarah Grand, Iota, and George Egerton. James H. Murphy examines the work of these and many other writers in a variety of contexts: the political, economic, and cultural developments of the time; the vicissitudes of the reading audience; the realities of a publishing industry that was for the most part London-based; the often difficult circumstances of the lives of the novelists; and the ever changing genre of the novel itself, to which Irish authors often made a contribution. Politics, history, religion, gender and, particularly, land, over which nineteenth-century Ireland was deeply divided, featured as key themes for fiction. Finally, the book engages with the critical debate of recent times concerning the supposed failure of realism in the nineteenth-century Irish novel, looking for more specific causes than have hitherto been offered and discovering occasions on which realism turned out to be possible.

In Time Is of the Essence, Patricia Murphy argues that the Victorian debate on the Woman Question was informed by a crucial but as yet unexplored element at the fin de siècle: the cultural construction of time. Victorians were obsessed with time in this century of incessant change, responding to such diverse developments as Darwinism, a newfound faith in progress, an unprecedented fascination with history and origins, and the nascent discipline of evolutionary psychology. The works examined here—novels by Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, H. Rider Haggard, Sarah Grand, and Mona Caird—manipulate prevalent discourses on time to convey anxieties over gender, which intensified in the century's final decades with the appearance of the rebellious New Woman. Unmasking the intricate relationship between time and gender that threaded through these and other works of the period, Murphy reveals that the cultural construction of time, which was grounded in the gender-charged associations of history, progress, Christianity, and evolution, served as a powerful vehicle for reinforcing rigid boundaries between masculinity and femininity. In the process, she also covers a number of other important and intriguing topics, including the effects of rail travel on Victorian perceptions of time and the explosion of watch production throughout the period.

By tracing the rise of the New Man alongside novelistic changes in the representations of marriage, MacDonald shows how this figure encouraged Victorian writers to reassess masculine behaviour and to re-imagine the marriage plot in light of wider social changes. She finds examples in novels by Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot and George Gissing.