Showing results by narrator "Jill Masters" in All Categories

The real Jonathan Wild, born about 1682 and executed at Tyburn in 1725, was one of the most notorious criminals of his age. His resemblance to the hero in Fielding's satire of the same name is general rather than particular. The real Jonathan (whose legitimate business was that of a buckle-maker) like Fielding, won his fame, not as a robber himself, but as an informer, and a receiver of stolen goods.

Almost three years after losing my husband, Jim, to ALS, I’ve started to emerge from the fog of widowhood, thanks in large part to my sexy roommate—and former high school crush—Tom Hammett. When he offered me a suite in his spacious home, he got me out of my parents’ basement where I’d lived with Jim during his illness and since his death. But now Tom is experiencing a health crisis, and I’m not sure I have it in me to go down that road again, even if I suspect I might be falling in love with him.

Thomas Hardy brings us an England that once existed but no more. It is rural, traditional, pastoral - a society of mannered conduct that flows like a deep river where powerful currents eddy and swirl. In this powerful novel of love and disillusion, Hardy's heroine is torn between the three men in her life. Passionate but capricious, her romantic involvements have fascinated generations of readers.

This book is often thought to be the story of Jane Austen's own lost love. In it, she seems mellowed and more philosophical, touched perhaps by the sentiment of a story in which she saw herself as the heroine but in whose happy outcome she has a premonition that she would never play a part.

Kept in the Dark is a probing psychological portrait of the near destruction of a marriage - a novel that combines keen insights with vigorous emotional strength. Jealousy, guilt, excessive pride, and compulsion all sweep across its surface.

"Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't understand! Look at this letter! The man who wrote it will marry her, or murder her, or do for her somehow. He's a bounder, but he's not an English bounder. He's mysterious and terrible. He's got a country behind him that's...

This fine novel sets in opposition two of Thomas Hardy’s most unforgettable creations: his heroine, the sensuous, free-spirited Eustacia Vye, and the solemn, majestic stretch of upland in Dorsetshire he called Egdon Heath. The famous opening reveals the haunting power of that dark, forbidding...

Full of irony, this comedy of manners satirizes the self-deception of vanity. Emma presents a picture of mixed family and social life as did Pride and Prejudice, though mellowed by a riper humor. Emma equals Pride and Prejudice in its rich humor and vivid portraiture of character. It is a never ending delight in human absurdities, which the fascinated listener shares from chapter to chapter.

Rule by head or rule by heart? Elinor Dashwood is a great believer in "sense," while her exuberant younger sister Marianne feels keenly that only "sensibility" (what today we'd call passion) serves to guide the heart. Through vicissitudes and, in the case of Marianne, outright betrayal by her lover, these two women learn the value in the other's outlook, and thereby prepare themselves for later domestic bliss that is the hallmark resolution of Jane Austen's novels.

The Well of the World's End is a Scottish fairy tale, from the Lowlands, collected by Joseph Jacobs in English Fairy Tales. In the story, a girl's mother died, and her father remarried. Her stepmother abused her, made her do all the housework, and finally decided to be rid of her. How the girl, with the help of a magic frog, outwitted the stepmother is the gist of the story.