Excerpt from William Wetmore Story and His Friends, Vol. 1 of 2: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections It may appear a new application of the truth that honour, where honour, as to any frank advance, attaches, is especially due to the light skirmishers, the eclaireurs, who have gone before ; yet there are occasions on which it comes home to us that, so far as we are contentedly cosmopolite to-day and move about in a world that has been made for us both larger and more amusing, we owe much of our extension and diversion to those comparatively few who, amid difficulties and dangers, set the example and made out the road. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from William Wetmore Story and His Friends, Vol. 1 of 2: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections The old relation, social, personal, aesthetic, of the American world to the European - a relation expressed practically, at the time, of course, in such active experiments as might be - is as charming a subject as the student of manners. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The three volumes that comprise this set are facsimile reproductions of contemporary biographical material. They include letters, memoirs, poems and articles on three outstanding Victorian literary partnerships. These are the Brownings, Brontes and the Rossettis.

Unpublished writings of Colin Rowe—letters, essays, lectures, and a postcard—clarify his thinking on key concepts while revealing his wit and erudition. Colin Rowe (1920–1999) was one of the great architectural historians of the twentieth century, publishing the influential works The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (1976) and Collage City (1978). While his written work was rigorous and authoritative, his lectures and letters were more casual, “carefully careless,” both witty and erudite. I Almost Forgot gathers twenty-three such writings—letters, essays, lectures, a postcard, and a eulogy. Both edifying and entertaining, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, occasionally scathing, they fill in personal details and clarify key concepts in Rowe’s work. In these writings, Rowe tells of the “Corbu superstructure upon a beaux-arts base” that refugee Polish architects and their students introduced to his alma mater, the University of Liverpool, in the early 1940s. He characterizes his controversial essay “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” as a “pretty clever but, otherwise, perfectly innocent little article,” and reports that Le Corbusier’s Villa Schwob “played an entirely disproportionate role in my mental life.” Rowe’s voice and opinions are strong in his discussions of architecture, current events, and his own life and work. Each piece begins with a brief introduction by the volume editor. The writings are illustrated by images of Rowe’s drawings, letters, and postcards; photographs and drawings of Rowe’s only built work; and illustrations chosen by Rowe for lectures.

Intimate Friends offers a fascinating look at the erotic friendships of educated English and American women over a 150-year period, culminating in the 1928 publication of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall's scandalous novel of lesbian love. Martha Vicinus explores all-female communities, husband-wife couples, liaisons between younger and older women, female rakes, and mother-daughter affection. Women, she reveals, drew upon a rich religious vocabulary to describe elusive and complex erotic feelings. Vicinus also considers the nineteenth-century roots of such contemporary issues as homosexual self-hatred, female masculinity, and sadomasochistic desire. Drawing upon diaries, letters, and other archival sources, she brings to life a variety of well known and historically less recognized women, ranging from the predatory Ann Lister, who documented her sexual activities in code; to Mary Benson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury; to the coterie of wealthy Anglo-American lesbians living in Paris. In vivid and colorful prose, Intimate Friends offers a remarkable picture of women navigating the uncharted territory of same-sex desire.

A biography of the passionate, contradictory father of William, Henry and Alice James. The author counters the popular view - a view that the James family perpetuated - that Henry James Sr was a benignant man who devoted himself to the good of his children, preached tolerance, and practised self-effacement. Instead, he shows us a man who developed a convoluted personal philosophy to account for his own feelings of pain and guilt, his conviction of his essential sinfulness and capacity for evil, and his fragile sense of self. The work sets Henry James Sr in the broader intellectual and cultural context of his age. As well as throwing light on the development of James's two sons, it is also a study of how families work.