The Maid Of Buttermere

Melvyn Bragg's highly-acclaimed bestselling historical novel, the story behind one of the 19th century's greatest scandals. Set in the Lake District in the early 19th century, the riveting story of an imposter, bigamist and fortune hunter who came to grief by falling helplessly in love with the famed 'Maid of Buttermere'.

Melvyn Bragg's highly-acclaimed bestselling historical novel, the story behind one of the 19th century's greatest scandals. Set in the Lake District in the early 19th century, the riveting story of an imposter, bigamist and fortune hunter who came to grief by falling helplessly in love with the famed 'Maid of Buttermere'.

Her engaging "journal" is now republished in this beautiful volume that provides remarkable black-and-white photographs of the Scottish scenes described. Carol Kyros Walker has captured the essence of these places in a photographic essay that follows each week of Wordsworth's recollections.

Exploring a range of early nineteenth-century cultural materials from canonical poetry and critical prose to women's magazines and gift-book engravings, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author offers new perspectives on the role of gender in Romanticism's defining paradigms of authorship. The Romantic author's claim to individual agency is complicated by its articulation in a market system perceived to be impelled in large part by fantasies of female desire - by what women read and write, what they buy and sell, how they look, and where they look for pleasure. These studies in the contested public spaces of literary labour elaborate the fundamental, if invisible, function of the woman as embodiment of authorial ambivalence in writing by Austen, Byron, Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Sarah Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Keats, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and others.

A lifetime of restraint and placid affection erupts when a retired bank manager falls for a youngh girl. Set in Cumbria, this is an intensely moving evocation of an overwhelming passion and its destructive kernel of jealousy.

British Romantic literature descends from a line of impostors, forgers and frauds. Through a series of case-studies - beginning with the golden age of forgery in the late eighteenth century and continuing through canonical Romanticism and its aftermath - Margaret Russett demonstrates how Romantic writers distinguished their fictions from the fakes surrounding them. The book examines canonical and lesser-known Romantic works alongside fakes such as Thomas Chatterton's medieval poems and 'Caraboo', the impostor-princess. Through original readings of works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Walter Scott, John Clare, and James Hogg, as well as chapters on impostors in popular culture, Russett's interdisciplinary and wide-ranging study offers a major reinterpretation of Romanticism and its continuing influence today.

By 'quite simply one of the best writers we have' (Sunday Telegraph), a profoundly moving story spanning three generations. 'It is a gem' Independent 'I loved it' Pat Barker Reaching from late 19th-century Cumbria to the present, this elegiac novel celebrates two spirited women: Grace, a farm labourer's daughter who fatefully followed her heart, and Mary, the child she was forced to give up. Unsung heroines according to Mary's son who, as his elderly mother's mind begins to fail, lovingly recreates their lives and the vanished country of their pasts, linking three generations in a chain of enduring love, loss and courage.

Young Harry, an orphan from an impoverished council estate, becomes the link between starkly contrasting worlds: north and south, the deprived and the over-privileged, the powerful and the defenceless. With this compelling story of blackmail, media politics, corrupted innocence and redemptive love, Melvyn Bragg delivers an unforgettable portrait of modern life.

"1851: The adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and family at the Great Exhibition" by Henry Mayhew is a fiction story from the English journalist. Known for his satire and his way with words, Mayhew's novel quickly became popular upon release. Though it's been over a century since then, it's still capturing the hearts and minds of readers to this day.