Τα 100 καλύτερα βρετανικά μυθιστορήματα

ΜΙΝΤΛΜΑΡΤΣ
Η Μαίρη Αν Έβανς (1819-80), περισσότερο γνωστή με το φιλολογικό ψευδώνυμο Τζωρτζ Έλιοτ, υπήρξε η κορυφαία ίσως λογοτέχνιδα της ύστερης βικτωριανής περιόδου. Με μια ιδιωτική ζωή που ερχόταν σε σύγκρουση προς τα πνιγηρά ήθη της βικτωριανής κοινωνίας κι επηρεασμένη έντονα από τα πρωτοπόρα πνευματικά κινήματα της εποχής, η Έλιοτ ασχολήθηκε αρχικά με τη λογοτεχνική κριτική και τις μεταφράσεις, αλλά στη συνέχεια αφιερώθηκε στο μυθιστόρημα. Στο λογοτεχνικό αυτό είδος η προσφορά της θεωρείται, έως τις ημέρες μας, καθοριστική, συνδυάζοντας πλούσιες...
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Middlemarch
«Πιστεύουμε σε εκείνην, όπως σε μια γυναίκα σταλμένη από τη θεία πρόνοια, τη στιγμή που συλλαμβάνουμε τον εαυτό μας να αμφιβάλλει για την αθανασία της ψυχής», έγραφε ο Χένρυ Τζέημς για την Δωροθέα Μπρούκ, που μοιράζεται, μαζί με τον νεαρό γιατρό Τέρτιο Λιντγκέιτ, όχι μοναχά τον κεντρικό ρόλο στο Middlemarch της Τζώρτζ Έλιοτ, αλλά και την ακράδαντη πεποίθηση πως η ζωή έχει πρωτίστως ηρωική διάσταση. Από τη στιγμή που το Middlemarch έτυχε ενθουσιώδους και θερμής αποδοχής από κοινό και κριτικούς, κατά την περίοδο 1871-2, η Τζώρτζ Έλιοτ αναγνω...
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(H/B) MIDDLEMARCH
Middlemarch is a monumental novel, and as much a delight to read today as it has ever been. George Eliot's immortal creations, the saintly and beautiful Dorothea Brooke, the dry-as-dust Edward Casaubon and the anguished progressive Tertius Lydgate, shine forth as some of the most exquisitely drawn characters in all of English literature. Eliot was at first criticised for the 'inartistic' realism of her story, which she subtitled 'A Study of Provincial Life' as if to claim it as a scholarly contribution to the new science of sociology. But ...
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(H/B) MIDDLEMARCH
MIDDLEMARCH: A STUDY OF PROVINCIAL LIFE, published 1871-2, is set in the imaginary county of Loamshire during the years of unrest preceding the 1832 Reform Bill. With its complex plot, broad canvas and huge cast of characters, it has long been recognized as one of the few truly classic English novels. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) MIDDLEMARCH
'the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts' The greatest 'state of the nation' novel in English, Middlemarch addresses ordinary life at a moment of great social change, in the years leading to the Reform Act of 1832. Through her portrait of a Midlands town, George Eliot addresses gender relations and class, self-knowledge and self-delusion, community and individualism. Eliot follows the fortunes of the town's central characters as they find, lose, and rediscover ideals and vocations in the world. Through its psyc...
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(P/B) MIDDLEMARCH
"People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are" George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his car...
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(P/B) MIDDLEMARCH
Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century. Henry James described Middlemarch as a `treasure house of detail' while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot's m...
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ΣΤΟ ΦΑΡΟ
Η Βιρτζίνια Γουλφ γεννήθηκε στο Λονδίνο το 1882 και μεγάλωσε σε αστικό και πολύ καλλιεργημένο περιβάλλον. Αυτοδίδακτη (όταν ήταν δεκατριών ετών ο πατέρας της της επέτρεψε να χρησιμοποιεί τη βιβλιοθήκη του χωρίς όρους), είχε την ατυχία να μη σπουδάσει αλλά και την τύχη να μείνει έτσι αμόλυντη από τον στείρο ακαδημαϊσμό των πανεπιστημίων. Το πεζό έργο της χαρακτηρίζει η τεχνική της συνειδησιακής ροής: καταγραφή των σκέψεων και αισθημάτων που «ρέουν» χωρίς καμία προφανή λογική σύνδεση, στη συνείδηση ενός προσώπου. Η Βιρτζίνια Γούλφ βρίσκεται ...
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(H/B) TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
To the Lighthouse, considered by many to be Virginia Woolf's finest novel, is a remarkably original work, showing the thoughts and actions of the members of a family and their guests on two separate occasions ten years apart. The setting is Mr and Mrs Ramsay's house on a Scottish island, where they traditionally take their summer holidays, overlooking a bay with a lighthouse. As a modernist author Woolf explored the ways in which fiction could represent reality, and To the Lighthouse can be seen as an experimental work that pushes the limi...
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(H/B) TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
Though its fame as an icon of twentieth-century literature rests primarily on the brilliance of its narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of its prose, To the Lighthouse is above all the story of a quest, and as such it possesses a brave and magical universality. Observed across the years at their vacation house facing the gales of the North Atlantic, Mrs. Ramsay and her family seek to recapture meaning from the flux of things and the passage of time. Though it is the death of Mrs. Ramsay on which the novel turns, her presenc...
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(P/B) TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
Inspired by the lost bliss of her childhood summers in Cornwall, Virginia Woolf produced one of the masterworks of English literature in To the Lighthouse. It concerns the Ramsay family and their summer guests on the Isle of Skye before and after the First World War. As children play and adults paint, talk, muse and explore, relationships shift and mutate. A captivating fusion of elegy, autobiography, socio-political critique and visionary thrust, it is the most accomplished of all Woolf s novels. On completing it, she thought she had exor...
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(P/B) TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives, give the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values. Virginia Woolf saw the novel as an elegy to her own parents, and in her diary she wrote, 'I used to think of him [father] and moth...
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(P/B) TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
To the Lighthouse is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. It is based on her own early experiences, and while it touches on childhood and children's perceptions and desires, it is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships, marriage and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War. (from the publisher)...
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Η ΚΥΡΙΑ ΝΤΑΛΟΓΟΥΕΙ (ΕΚΔΟΣΗ POCKET)
Η πενηνταδυάχρονη κυρία Νταλογουέι, η "τέλεια οικοδέσποινα", προετοιμάζει μια από τις συνηθισμένες κοσμικές δεξιώσεις της, όταν φτάνει ξαφνικά από την Ινδία ο πρώτος της έρωτας, ο Πίτερ Γουόλς. Ο ερχομός του ξυπνά στην Κλαρίσα Νταλογουέι έντονες αναμνήσεις από το παρελθόν και προκαλεί έντονες αντιδράσεις στο παρόν. Μια εμπνευσμένη λογοτεχνική σκιαγράφηση της ανθρώπινης συνείδησης, ένα μυθιστόρημα του ποιητή, που απευθύνεται στον ποιητή που κρύβει μέσα του κάθε αναγνώστης. (Από την παρουσίαση στο οπισθόφυλλο του βιβλίου)...
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(H/B) MRS DALLOWAY
On a perfect June morning, Clarissa Dalloway fashionable, worldly, wealthy, an accomplished hostess sets off to buy flowers for the party she is to give that evening. She is preoccupied with thoughts of the present and memories of the past, and from her interior monologue emerge the people who have touched her life. On the same day Septimus Warren Smith, a shellshocked survivor of the Great War, commits suicide, and casual mention of his death at the party provokes in Clarissa thoughts of her own isolation and loneliness. Bold and experime...
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(H/B) MRS DALLOWAY
Tracing a day in the life of society hostess Clarissa Dalloway, Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally published in 1925, MRS DALLOWAY is her First complete rendering of what Woolf described as the 'luminous envelope' of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind's inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality. (from the publisher)...
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(P/B) MRS DALLOWAY
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus. She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith is young, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the who...
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(P/B) MRS DALLOWAY
'She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day' Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Smith's day interweaves with that of Clarissa and her friends, their lives converging as the party reaches its glittering climax. Virginia Woolf...
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(P/B) Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a break with the traditional novel form and reflects a genuine humanity and a concern with the experiences that both enrich and stultify existence. Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party. Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers gradually reveal the characters of the central protagonists. Clarissa's life is touched by tragedy as the events in her day run parallel to those of Septimus Warr...
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(P/B) MRS DALLOWAY
In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and, met with the realities of the present, she re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life....
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