Back of the book

Blurb from the back of the book

Back of the Book: Dracula

14 Mar 2011

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Now reading….

The most famous figure of seductive evil in Western Literature, bloodthirsty Count Dracula has inspired countless movies, books, and plays. But few, if any, have been faithful to Bram Stoker’s original best-selling novel of mystery and horror, love and death, sin and redemption.
Written in the form of letters and diary entries, Dracula chronicles the vampire’s journey from his Transylvanian castle to the nightmare streets of London. There, he searches for the blood he needs to stay alive–the blood of strong men and beautiful women–while his enemies plot to rid the world of his frightful power. 
In Dracula, Stoker created a new word for terror, a new myth to feed our nightmares, and a character who will undoubtedly outlive us all.

By: Shannon Category: Back of the book, Classic literature, Gothic, Victorian Tags: ,

Back of the Book: Wuthering Heights

21 Feb 2011

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“Wuthering Heights–Emily Bronte’s only novel–remains one of literature’s most disturbing explorations into the dark side of romantic passion.

An unpolished and devastating epic of childhood playmates who grow into soul mates. Wuthering Heights revolves around the willfully childish Catherine and the dark Heathcliff, who, in the words of Charlotte Bronte, “exemplifies the effects which a life of continued injustice and hard usage may produce on a naturally perverse, vindictive, and inexorable disposition.” Heathcliff and Cathy believe they’re destined to love each other forever. But when cruelty and snobbery separate them, their untamed emotions literally consume them.

Set amid the wild and stormy Yorkshire moors, Wuthering Heights is widely regarded as the most original tale of thwarted desire and heartbreak in the English language.”

By: Shannon Category: Back of the book, Classic literature, Gothic, Victorian

Back of the Book: Agnes Grey

17 Feb 2011

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“Written when woman–and workers generally–had few rights in England, Agnes Grey exposes the brutal inequalities of the rigid class system in mid-nineteeth-century Britain. Agnes comes from a respectable middle-class family, but their financial reverses have forced her to seek work as a governess. Pampered and protected at home, she is unprepared for the harsh reality of a governess’s life. At the Bloomfields’ and later the Murrays’, she suffers under the snobbery and sadism of the self-indulgent upper-class adults and the shrieking insolence of their spoiled children. Worse the unique social and economic position of a governess–”beneath” her employers but “above” their servants–condemns her to a life of loneliness.
Less celebrated than her older sisters Charlotte and Emily, Anne Bronte was also less interested in spinning wildly symbolic, romantic tales and more determined to draw realistic images of conditions in Victorian England that needed changing.”

By: Shannon Category: Back of the book, Classic literature, Realism, Victorian