Kirjahaku

Far from a victim or an obstacle to Lord Byron’s work, Lady Byron was a rebel against the fashionable snobbery of her class, founding the first Infants School and Co-Operative School in England. A poet and a talented mathematician, Lady Byron supported the education of her precocious daughter, Ada Lovelace, now recognised as a pioneer of computer science and she saved from death her “adoptive daughter”, Medora Leigh, the child of Lord Byron’s incestuous affair with his sister. Lady Byron was adored by the younger abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe and by many notable friends. Yet her complex relationships with her family, including the sister Byron loved, runs like a live wire through this skillfully told, ground-breaking biography of a remarkable woman who made a life for herself and became a leading light in her century.

Acclaimed biographer Julia Markus has written an unprecedented and illuminating portrait of the brilliant, tortured, and controversial James Anthony Froude—the quintessential Victorian, father of modern biography, historian, diplomat, and prodigal son. J. Anthony Froude expertly captures the roiling cultural history of a century through one man’s dynamic life. From his birth in 1818 to his death in 1894, J. Anthony Froude embodied the issues and complexities of his time. Through the story of his life, Markus elucidates the major ideological issues of the nineteenth century—sexuality, colonialism, and the widespread challenges to religion’s long-held cultural primacy. In beautifully crafted prose, Markus reveals the compelling life of one of the most important thinkers of the Victorian age—the brutality of his early education, his troubled relationship with his father, his expulsion from Oxford, his dramatic and dazzling literary career, his delicious political incorrectness, his two marriages, his relationships with his children, his friendships with such disparate luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Cardinal Newman, his diplomatic work for Prime Minister Disraeli, and his complex relationship with Thomas Carlyle, his spiritual father and the subject of his most famous biography. A. L. Rowse, historian and author, called Froude the “last great Victorian awaiting revival.” No life of the period is more poignant, no destiny more fascinating, than that of this man whom in his books and his actions reflected the triumphs and the errors of his society.

Betsy Lewis is an innocent abroad until she meets Alice Blanders Russo and her much younger lover, Leo Conti. Together they form a triangle of friendship and desire that will turn Betsy's marriage-and her principles-upside down. Add a hilarious excursion to find her Italian "roots" and the rediscovery of an old friend (brilliant, black and gay), and Betsy is on a road to self-discovery filled with unexpected turnings and definitely dangerous curves. Alive with the attractions and contradictions of Rome and the Americans who gathered there in the '60's and '70's, Friends Along the Way explores serious relationships with just the right touch of wild humor, capturing the flavor of love Italian style-rich, robust, and a feast to remember.

Irv Bender knew the meaning of devotion-he had sacrificed his own chance for a college education so that his beloved brother Babe could go. But it is Irv, not Babe, who will become the family achiever. As half-owner of a summer camp in the Poconos, he earns more than enough to become his brother's keeper...and a discreetly benevolent "uncle" to his partner, Mandy Mershheimer, the novelist; histalented, attractive niece, Suzanne; and his prot g and assistant, Larry Driscoll. But it is the nature of benevolence to breed resentments. And it is the nature of good intentions to frequently yield unforeseen pain. Julia Markus's remarkable novel is a rich, compressed story of the complex relationships between family and friends, and of one man making peace with the past. Uncle won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award in 1978.Julia Markus, an English professor at Hofstra University, received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award for her first novel, Uncle, which was followed by three well-received novels, American Rose, Friends Along the Way and A Change of Luck, as wellas her critically acclaimed biographies, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Across An Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time and Lady Byron and Her Daughters. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two National Endowment for the Humanities grants.

Rose was born to a family of extraordinary women. Her immigrant great-grandmother, the first Rose, a shrewd and beautiful fortune-teller, who gave abortions to make "a little extra"...Proud Etta, matriarch, lover of costly things, who kept a fine home with a firm hand...Delicate Helen, musical prodigy, who soared on her talent into madness. Now Rose-American Rose-must face up to all their lives in order to claim her own.