The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot

The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot
Author: Angus Wilson
Publisher: Penguin Group
Total Pages: 456
Release: 1960
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Meg Eliot is perhaps one of the most remarkable portraits of a middle-aged woman in English literature. She boldly debunked the dismal array of stereotypical, female characters of her day and succeeded in forging a life and role for herself beyond her fictional predecessors, influencing a generation of female readers. First published in 1958, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot is the story of a barrister's wife who harbors a great deal of guilt over the privileged life she leads. To assuage this guilt, she occupies her time with charity committees and helping those less fortunate. However, she is forced to confront her own misfortune when she is shockingly and suddenly widowed. Learning slowly to draw on her own strenth and self-worth, Mrs Meg Eliot begins to remake herself as a woman on her own. The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot is a supremely sensitive portrayal of human perseverance and feminine determination.

The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot
Author: Angus Wilson
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2012-08-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0571286844

Meg Eliot is the wife of a successful barrister and with that comes a lovely home in Westminster, cocktail parties and a round of charity committees. She is the model wife and her life is one of ease, contentment and privilege. All that changes though when she is suddenly left widowed after a senseless tragedy. Totally alone she is thrust into a struggle to reconstruct her life as she realises that she doesn't really know who she is anymore or who she is supposed to be. The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot follows Meg as she tries to make sense of the realities of life, of living and contemplates the future and its possibilites. What she finds is the ability to survive and, also, the joys of new friendships, new opportunities and perhaps even the idea of a new love. Described by the Daily Telegraph as 'one of fiction's great female creatures', Meg Eliot is a powerful heroine who inspired readers when she first appeared in 1958.

British Literature in Transition, 1940-1960: Postwar

British Literature in Transition, 1940-1960: Postwar
Author: Gill Plain
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107119014

Examines debates central to postwar British culture, showing the pressures of reconstruction and the mutual implication of war and peace.

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
Author: Angus Wilson
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2011-11-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0571280862

'Angus Wilson is one of the most enjoyable novelists of the 20th century... Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) analyses a wide range of British society in a complicated plot that offers all the pleasures of detective fiction combined with a steady and humane insight.' Margaret Drabble First published in 1956, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes draws upon perhaps the most famous archaeological hoax in history: the 'Piltdown Man', finally exposed in 1953. The novel's protagonist is Gerald Middleton, professor of early medieval history and taciturn creature of habit. Separated from his Swedish wife, Gerald is increasingly conscious of his failings. Moreover, some years ago he was involved in an excavation that led to the discovery of a grotesque idol in the tomb of Bishop Eorpwald. The sole survivor of the original excavation party, Gerald harbours a potentially ruinous secret...

Angus Wilson

Angus Wilson
Author: Peter J. Conradi
Publisher: Northcote House Pub Limited
Total Pages: 97
Release: 1997
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0746308035

Sir Angus Wilson shot to fame in the late 1940's - his first stories were greeted by Sean O'Faolain and Evelyn Waugh alike with delight. He was championed at once as an odd realist providing new social maps of post-war England - V S Pritchett was to see him as revising the conventional picture of English Character, and recovering broadness without losing humanity. He has many faces as a writer. If he inherits the comic Dickensian novel of social depth and density, he also marries this to a recognisably modern anxiety and insecurity about the 'self'. Wilson's major books often concern 'creative breakdown': they depict people who undergo a crisis and/or collapse of self-belief, and then have to find the courage to invent themselves anew.

The Letters of T. S. Eliot

The Letters of T. S. Eliot
Author: T. S. Eliot
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 914
Release: 2011-09-20
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0300176864

Volume One: 1898–1922 presents some 1,400 letters encompassing the years of Eliot's childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, through 1922, by which time the poet had settled in England, married his first wife, and published The Waste Land. Since the first publication of this volume in 1988, many new materials from British and American sources have come to light. More than two hundred of these newly discovered letters are now included, filling crucial gaps in the record and shedding new light on Eliot's activities in London during and after the First World War. Volume Two: 1923–1925 covers the early years of Eliot's editorship of The Criterion, publication of The Hollow Men, and his developing thought about poetry and poetics. The volume offers 1,400 letters, charting Eliot's journey toward conversion to the Anglican faith, as well as his transformation from banker to publisher and his appointment as director of the new publishing house Faber & Gwyer. The prolific and various correspondence in this volume testifies to Eliot's growing influence as cultural commentator and editor.

Four Contemporary Novels

Four Contemporary Novels
Author: Kerry McSweeney
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 224
Release: 1983-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0773560858

Four Contemporary Novelists offer accounts of the fiction of Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, and V. S. Naipaul. The author has charted the development of each writer; identified dominant themes, controlling techniques, and informing sensibility; explained what each has tried to accomplish and compare theory to practice; provided an appropriate context for appreciation and evaluation of all parts of each canon; and made qualitative discriminations.

Prime Time

Prime Time
Author: John Benson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2014-07-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317890450

Numerous studies consider the history of childhood, adolescence and old age, yet the middle aged, consistently the most productive and powerful of age groups have been consistently ignored. In this pioneering study John Benson considers how perceptions and experience of middle age have changed, and how its power-base has diminished, affected by the steady ageing of the population the increasing independence of the yound and growing economic insecurity. This thought-provoking study also illuminates the whole economic, social and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain.