classic

A So-So Classic with Unlikable Characters Author: Edith Wharton Newland Archer, former lover of a married woman, has sown his wild oats. He is ready to settle down, yet he hopes that his new wife, May Well, will be open to his ideas. Despite having chosen May and wooed her for her societal prestige, her cosseted goodness, her forced innocence, he has ideas about the liberation of a woman’s mind. He is at war with himself – with what he says he wants and what he really wants. But he realizes none of this. Enter the Countess Olenska, a distant relative [...]

Rags to Riches and Anger to Forgiveness Author: George Eliot Silas Marner is a simple man. A weaver, good at his craft. A churchgoer, an engaged man. Nothing out of the ordinary, at least as far as everyone knows. But Silas does have spells, moments where he experiences something like a trance and losses time. In his time and place, this could be misconstrued as demonic, an aberration that requires the strictest judgement. No one must know. When Silas falls into one of his trances while watching over the ill church dean, who later dies, he awakens to a corpse and [...]