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In a world where a gentleman’s life is defined more “by being, rather than by doing,” a family’s reputation can be compromised if it is not guarded carefully, and the sole heir of the Amberson family is proving himself to be a difficult person. Expected by the family to carry on its proud traditions, George Amberson Minafer is trusted implicitly. But though rich relatives provide the elegant suits, the handsome young man who wears them is filled with little but appearances. And this happens in spite of, or perhaps, because of, his mother’s selfless love that places him above her own happiness. As George’s uncle perceptively remarks, “life and money both behave like loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks.” With the new automobile industry transforming fortunes and coal heat transforming city air into sooty clouds, anything that stands still is apt to be run over, or at least begrimed. What is magnificent about the Ambersons is their faithful reliance on old money and old ways in a world changing rapidly around them. Or perhaps it is the magnificence of the train-wreck created when George’s relatives, with the best intentions, shield h...

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In the High Valley is the fifth and last book of the popular What Katy did series by Susan Coolidge. The story starts out with Lionel Young and his sister, Imogen who set out for the picturesque but remote High Valley (America), leaving their hometown Devonshire (England) behind. Lionel wants to take the share in Geoffrey Templestowe's cattle business. Imogen, owing to her prejudices against America and the American way of life, finds it hard to adjust to life over there. Clover Templestowe, now happily married and living in the High Valley, at first finds it very trying to get on with Imogen. A lot of events ensure in the course of which we meet again with Rose Red, get news from Cousin Helen and of course meet Katy again... until it all finally ends in a lovely double wedding! (Summary by Elli)...

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Rosalie Vanderpoel, the daughter of an American multimillionaire marries an impoverished English baronet and goes to live in England. She all but loses contact with her family in America. Years later her younger sister Bettina, beautiful, intelligent and extremely rich, goes to England to find what has happened to her sister. She finds Rosalie shabby and dispirited, cowed by her husband's ill treatment. Bettina sets about to rectify matters. She meets Lord Mount Dunstan, an impoverished earl, who lives nearby and they fall in love, but he cannot speak because it would look as if he were after her money... This is a romance but it is also about the rejuvenating effects of Americans and American money on a somewhat decadent English aristocracy. (Summary by Tabithat)...

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Parnassus on Wheels is about a fictional traveling book-selling business. The original owner of the business, Roger Mifflin, sells it to 39-year-old Helen McGill, who is tired of taking care of her ailing older brother, Andrew. (summary from wikipedia)...

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An American heiress nicknamed the Manitou Princess (after her daddy's richest silver mine) is devastated to find that her fiancé only loves her money, so she does what anyone might do: she bolts for Europe, dons male attire and sets out on a walking tour of the Alps, passing as a teenage boy. Though professing hatred of all men, she soon falls in with a just-jilted English lord, aptly named Monty Lane, who is attempting to walk off a broken heart of his own. The Princess Passes presents the ups and downs of their alpine relationship through the unpenetrating eyes of Lord Lane. Why, he wonders, is he thus drawn to this beautiful youth? And has the boy a sister? Co-author Alice Livingston, of Poughkeepsie, New York, mentions in her memoirs that she sailed for Europe after a boyfriend tried to shoot her. In London she met literary editor Charles Williamson and began writing for the story magazines of media mogul Lord Northcliffe. At one point she found herself scribbling six serials simultaneously, on the income from which she and Williamson married. She later spun some of her husband's detailed descriptive notes made during their moto...

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Framley Parsonage is the fourth novel in Anthony Trollope's series known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, first published in serial form in the Cornhill Magazine in 1860. (Summary by Wikipedia Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic. — W. H. Auden...

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There is no more pathetic figure in our world to-day than the common figure of the poor young lady, crushed between classes above and below, and left with scarce a chance of earning her bread with decency. So says Juliet Appleton’s boss, encouraging her to put her story into print. How will this college-educated 23-year-old survive the Darwinian Battle of Life in late Victorian England? She’s fundless in London but armed, by way of adaptive structures, with those two high-tech devices of the day: a bicycle for mobility and a typewriter for utility. (Summary by Grant Hurlock)...

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Fiction

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Dickens' last complete novel was published serially 1864-5. It begins with an intriguing fortune offered to John Harmon by his late father, a rich dust contractor, in his will. To receive the money, John must marry a certain Bella Wilfer who he does not know from Eve. He is returning from the exile enforced by his father and confides in a ship's mate who attempts to murder him. The mate gets killed instead, leaving one inconvenient corpse. Because John is considered dead (the body is found with his papers), the money passes to Mr Boffin, old Harmon's foreman. Harmon adopts Bella and John comes into his employ disguised as John Rokesmith. Bella does not fall for John but through kindly Boffin's contrivances learns to hate money and fall for her suitor under his false name. Eventually she learns of his true identity as the Boffins had previously, and the villainous one-legged Silas Wegg's plot to blackmail Mr Boffin is brought to light. There is also a story running behind the main plot about a certain Eugene Wrayburn and his love for Lizzie Hexam, and his rival's attempt to murder him. The two plots are only really connected through ...

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Fiction

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At a certain committee meeting held in the spring of 1916, it was agreed that fourteen leading American authors, known to be extremely generous as well as gifted, should be asked to write a composite novel. ... Third, to have the novel finished and published serially during the autumn Campaign of 1917. The carrying out of these requirements has not been the childish diversion it may have seemed. Splendid team work, however, has made success possible. Every author represented, every worker on the team, has gratuitously contributed his or her services; and every dollar realized by the serial and book publication of The Sturdy Oak will be devoted to the Suffrage Cause. But the novel itself is first of all a very human story of American life today. It neither unduly nor unfairly emphasizes the question of equal suffrage, and it should appeal to all lovers of good fiction. (Summary from the preface)...

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Fiction

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The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was the last major novel by Herman Melville, the American writer and author of Moby-Dick. Published on April 1, 1857 (presumably the exact day of the novel's setting), The Confidence-Man was Melville's tenth major work in eleven years. The novel portrays a Canterbury Tales-style group of steamboat passengers whose interlocking stories are told as they travel down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. The novel is written as cultural satire, allegory, and metaphysical treatise, dealing with themes of sincerity, identity, morality, religiosity, economic materialism, irony, and cynicism. Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Melville's Moby-Dick and Bartleby the Scrivener as a precursor to 20th-century literary preoccupations with nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism....

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Fiction

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Wharton's classic story of an aging (by Victorian-era standards) spinster socialite who would rather marry for money than for true love.(Summary by BellonaTimes)...

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Fiction

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Clearly frustrated at the refusal of his contemporaries to recognise the iniquity of society, Tressell's cast of hypocritical Christians, exploitative capitalists and corrupt councillors provide a backdrop for his main target — the workers who think that a better life is not for the likes of them. Hence the title of the book; Tressell paints the workers as philanthropists who throw themselves into back-breaking work for poverty wages in order to generate profit for their masters. The hero of the book, Frank Owen, is a socialist who believes that the capitalist system is the real source of the poverty he sees all around him. In vain he tries to convince his fellow workers of his world view, but finds that their education has trained them to distrust their own thoughts and to rely on those of their betters. Much of the book consists of conversations between Owen and the others, or more often of lectures by Owen in the face of their jeering; this was presumably based on Tressell's own experiences.(Summary by Tadhg)...

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A tragic but very captivating tale of a monk in the 17th century. There were actually two authors: Ambrose Bierce and Adolph de Castro.

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Best known for his literary work The Blue Lagoon , which has been made into film several times over, H. De Vere Stacpoole’s first publication was a book titled The Intended in 1894. Stacpoole was disappointed at its lack of commercial success, and felt the story was too good to let go. He eventually re-worked the book, culminating in The Man Who Lost Himself , a light-hearted story of a luckless American visiting London on yet another of his failed business ventures, when he happens upon a gentleman of status and wealth, who also just happens to be his exact look-alike. (Summary by Roger Melin)...

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Fiction

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This novella explores the relationship between Frank Saltram, a charismatic speaker who is also a freeloader; Ruth Anvoy, a young American who visits her widowed aunt, Lady Coxon, an American who married a Brit; and George Gravener, a British intellectual with a future in politics who becomes engaged to Ms. Anvoy. The story revolves around the dispersal of The Coxon Fund, a sum of money left by Ms. Anvoy’s father with the stipulation that is be given to a great man to publish and pursue moral truth. (Summary by Dorlene Kaplan)...

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The story of seven girls who have banded themselves together for mutual help and cheer under the name of Nous Autres. They represent, collectively, the professions open to women of no deliberate training, though well educated. They are introduced to the reader at one of their weekly gatherings and then the author proceeds to depict the home and business life of each one individually. (From the 1909 back-of-book advertisement)...

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Fiction

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This is the final volume in the trilogy following the smart, stylish, divorced and independent businesswoman Emma McChesney in her career from stenographer, then drummer (traveling salesman) to owner of her own company. (The first was Roast Beef, Medium and the second Personality Plus both in the catalog). Edna Ferber first gained success with these stories and later went on to write Show Boat, Giant and other well known books. First published in 1915, Emma's son, Jock, has moved to Chicago with his new wife. Emma decides to sell in South America and proves she has not lost her magic touch. Emma gets involved in romance, saving a business and many other things. Emma symbolizes the ideal woman at the dawn of the twentieth century: sharp, capable, charming, and progressive. ( Summary by Phil Chenevert)...

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Fiction

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Charley Steele is a successful and brilliant Canadian lawyer. He has a nagging wife, Kathleen, and a lazy brother-in- law, Billy. In spite of his success, he is disillusioned with his life, drinks too much, and is deeply troubled by his agnosticism which leads to trouble and confusion. When Billy embezzles money, Charley discovers the theft and sets out to make things right. Charley however, ends up in a waterfront saloon where he encounters a barroom brawl and becomes unconscious. Charley loses his memory and ends up in the Canadian Northwoods where he falls in love with a pretty postmistress, Rosalie. He finds he is perfectly content with his new life but when his memory returns, he is deeply disturbed by his past and ponders whether to return to his old life to make amends. Mystery, romance, and intrigue are interwoven throughout the novel. The Right of Way was made into movies in 1915, 1920, and 1931. (Summary by Tom Weiss)...

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Vera (1921) by Elizabeth von Arnim is a black comedy based on her disastrous second marriage to Earl Russell: a mordant analysis of the romantic delusions through which wives acquiesce in husbands' tyrannies. In outline the story of this utterly unromantic novel anticipates DuMaurier's Rebecca. Naive Lucy Entwhistle is swept into marriage by widower, Everard Wemyss. His mansion The Willows is pervaded by the spectre of his dead wife Vera, with whom Lucy becomes obsessed. ... Here the servants are partisan for both wives, and lose no opportunity to disrupt Everard's unctuous, oppressive household routines. An extraordinarily black vision of marriage, also continuously funny, the novel's power lies in the wit and economy of the usually prolix Von Arnim....

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Dombey and Son is a novel by the Victorian author Charles Dickens. The story concerns Paul Dombey, the wealthy owner of the shipping company of the book's title, whose dream is to have a son to continue his business. The book begins when his son is born, and Dombey's wife dies shortly after giving birth. As with most of Dickens' work, a number of socially significant themes are to be found in this book. In particular the book deals with the then-prevalent common practice of arranged marriages for financial gain. Other themes to be detected within this work include child cruelty (particularly in Dombey's treatment of Florence), familial relationships, and as ever in Dickens, betrayal and deceit and the consequences thereof. (Wikipedia)...

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Fiction