Over the course of her long, prolific career, Agatha Christie gave the world a wealth of ingenious whodunits and page-turning locked-room mysteries featuring Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, and a host of other unforgettable characters. She also gave us Come, Tell Me How You Live, a charming, fascinating, and wonderfully witty nonfiction account of her days on an archaeological dig in Syria with her husband, renowned archeologist Max Mallowan. Something...

The producer and writer of the CBS hit series "I Heart Abishola" tells the story of growing up as the child of Nigerian immigrants in London and her career as a stand-up comic and eventual Hollywood success.

On a stormy night two hundred years ago, a young woman sat in a dark house and dreamed of her life as a writer. She longed to follow the path her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had started down, but young Mary Shelley had yet to be inspired. As the night wore on, Mary grew more anxious. The next day was the deadline that her friend, the poet Lord Byron, had set for writing the best ghost story. After much talk of science and the secrets of life,...

The story of a remarkable woman who wrote a novel that not only became a classic, but also changed the way human society views and treats animals. Born in 1829 to a young Quaker couple, Anna Sewell grew up in poverty in London. She was fourteen when she fell and injured her ankle, which left her permanently disabled. Rejecting the life of a Victorian invalid, she developed an extraordinary empathy with horses, learning to ride side-saddle and to...

"This fascinating work shares the intimate details of the Brontë sisters' lives and reveals how their imagination, creativity, and passion helped them achieve their childhood dreams of being published authors"--

"Keynote Jane Austen and the Brontës endure as the leading ladies of English literature, but why are these reclusive parsons' daughters the only ones we remember? Funny and fascinating, Shelley DeWees's nonfiction debut, Not Just Jane, revisits British history through the extraordinary lives and work of seven long-forgotten authoresses--and wonders why they, and so many others, faded into obscurity (and what we are missing because of it)"--

Presents the 1857 version of Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of her fellow author Charlotte Brontë, and includes a critical introduction, and notes on subsequent variations.

Substantially enlarged and updated, this new edition of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English confirms its status as the most authoritative survey of its subject now available in a single volume. Its coverage of novelists, poets, playwrights, and their works embraces both the established classics of English literature and a wealth of contemporary figures from all over the English-speaking world, such as Saul Bellow, Les Murray, R. K. Narayan,...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is one of our greatest writers. But before that, she was just an ordinary girl.