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166 pages : 24 cm

166 pages : 24 cm

166 pages : 24 cm

166 pages : 24 cm

166 pages : 24 cm

166 pages : 24 cm

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200 pages ; 24 cm

200 pages ; 24 cm

200 pages ; 24 cm

200 pages ; 24 cm

200 pages ; 24 cm

Bibliography: p. 451-452

Bibliography: p. 451-452

Bibliography: p. 451-452

Bibliography: p. 451-452

Bibliography: p. 451-452

1Castle of Otranto

By Horace Walpole

The Castle of Otranto is a 1764 novel by Horace Walpole. It is generally held to be the first gothic novel, initiating a literary genre which would become extremely popular in the later 18th century and early 19th century. Thus, Castle, and Walpole by extension is arguably the forerunner to such authors as Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, Daphne du Maurier, and Stephen King. (Summary by Wikipedia)

2Golden Scarecrow

By Hugh Walpole

Toying with the distinctions between reader and narrator, author and character, imagination and perception, Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole's The Golden Scarecrow, in nine chapters, presents nine stories of nine children, united by location, more or less. A tenth story of a tenth life, divided into Prologue and Epilogue, provides a different sort of unity. These gentle and horrible tales of the weird may seem suitable for young readers, then again, they may not. (Summary by Cynthia Moyer)

Manfred, der Fürst von Otranto ist besorgt um die Zukunft seines Hauses und will deshalb seinen Sohn so bald als möglich mit Isabelle verheiraten, die durch ihren Vater Friedrich selbst Ansprüche auf Otranto machen kann. Friedrich ist auf dem Kreuzzug in Gefangenschaft geraten und gilt als tot.<br> Auf dem Weg zur Trauung erleidet Manfreds Sohn einen tödlichen Unfall - er wird von einem riesigen Helm erschlagen. Kurz darauf erscheint eine riesige Gestalt in der Burg und löst Panik unter den Bediensteten aus. Doch Manfred hat ganz andere Sorgen. Da sein Sohn nun tot ist, will er selbst die schöne Isabelle heiraten, aber dazu muss er seine Gemahlin Hippolite überreden, in eine Scheidung einzuwilligen. Außerdem ist da noch Theodor, der sich unschuldig Manfreds Zorn zuzieht, durch die Fürsprache Mathildens, Manfreds Tochter, gerettet wird und später Isabelle bei deren Flucht vor Manfreds Nachstellungen hilft. <br> Die Situation spitzt sich zu, als 500 Bewaffnete vor der Burg erscheinen, die ein riesiges Schwert mit sich führen und im Namen Friedrichs die Herausgabe von Isabelle fordern. Auch taucht die riesige Gestalt wieder in der Burg auf und man munkelt allenthalben von einer alten Prophezeiung, die Burg und Herrschaft Otranto solle dem Geschlecht Manfreds entwendet werden, wenn dem wirklichen Besitzer seine Behausung zu enge würde. <br></br> Die Burg von Otranto gilt als erste Gothic Novel und damit als Wegbereiter für Dracula, Frankenstein und co. Die anonyme deutsche Übersetzung von 1810 ist in einer auch damals schon altertümlichen Sprache gehalten. (Zusammenfassung von Hokuspokus)

4Joseph Conrad

By Hugh Walpole

This is a literary biography of Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) who is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English. He was granted British nationality in 1886, but always considered himself a Pole. Though he did not speak English fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent), he was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit.<br /><br /> Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE (1884 – 1941) was an English novelist. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, intended for a career in the church but drawn instead to writing. Among those who encouraged him were the authors Henry James and Arnold Bennett. His skill at scene-setting, vivid plots, and high profile as a lecturer brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. He was a best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, but has been largely neglected since his death.... Joseph Conrad said of him, "We see Mr. Walpole grappling with the truth of things spiritual and material with his characteristic earnestness, and we can discern the characteristics of this acute and sympathetic explorer of human nature." - Summary by Wikipedia and david wales

5Cathedral

By Hugh Walpole

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE (1884 – 1941) was an English novelist. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, intended for a career in the church but drawn instead to writing. Among those who encouraged him were the authors Henry James and Arnold Bennett. His skill at scene-setting, vivid plots, and high profile as a lecturer brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. He was a best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, but has been largely neglected since his death.... One of Walpole's major novels of the early post-war period was The Cathedral, which unlike much of his fiction was not dashed off but worked on across four years, beginning in 1918. The story of an arrogant 19th-century archdeacon in conflict with other clergy and laity was certain to bring comparisons with Trollope's Barchester Towers (The Manchester Guardian 's review was headed "Polchester Towers"), but unlike the earlier work, The Cathedral is wholly uncomic.... The reviewer Ivor Brown commented that Walpole had earlier charmed many with his cheerful tales of Mayfair, but that in this novel he showed a greater side to his art: "This is a book with little happiness about it, but its stark strength is undeniable. The Cathedral is realism, profound in its philosophy and delicate in its thread." The Illustrated London News said, "No former novelist has seized quite so powerfully upon the cathedral fabric and made it a living character in the drama, an obsessing individuality at once benign and forbidding. ...The Cathedral is a great book." The Jubilee which plays an important part in the story is the national celebration in 1897 of Queen Victoria's sixty years on the throne. Summary by Wikipedia and david wales

6Jeremy

By Hugh Walpole

With affectionate humor, Mr. Walpole tells the story of Jeremy and his two sisters, Helen and Mary Cole, who grow up in Polchester, a quiet English Cathedral town. There is the Jampot, who is the nurse ; Hamlet, the stray dog ; Uncle Samuel, who paints pictures and is altogether 'queer’; of course, Mr. and Mrs. Cole, and Aunt Amy. Mr. Walpole has given his narrative a rare double appeal, for it not only recreates for the adult the illusion of his own happiest youth, but it unfolds for the child-reader a genuine and moving experience with real people and pleasant things. No child will fail to love the birthday in the Cole household, the joyous departure for the sea and the country in the long vacation. ( Joseph Hergesheimer, Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation, 1919, p 38 and david wales)

Horace Walpole, 4th earl of Orford, was a cultivated participant in, and observer of, the social and political life of Georgian England. His charming and witty letters are valuable pictures of the age. "A man so blessed that he could unfold every gift, every foible, whose long life spreads like a great lake reflecting houses and friends and wars and snuff boxes and revolutions and lap dogs, the great and the little, all intermingled, and behind them a stretch of the serene blue sky." Virginia Woolf. (Summary by barbara2)

8Hieroglyphic Tales

By Horace Walpole

Surreal and satirical, these stories by the eighteenth century man of letters, Whig politician, art historian and antiquarian are '"...mere whimsical trifles, written chiefly for private entertainment, and for private amusement... an attempt to vary the stale and beaten class of stories and novels, which, though works of invention, are almost always devoid of imagination...." Horace Walpole - Summary by barbara2

9Jeremy And Hamlet: A Chronicle Of Certain Incidents In The Lives Of A Boy, A Dog, And A Country Town

By Hugh Walpole

Hamlet is Jeremy’s dog. This 1923 book is Hugh Walpole’s second volume in his Jeremy semi-autobiographical trilogy (Jeremy (1919 available at librivox.org), Jeremy at Crale (1927, available at fadedpage.org)), about a ten-year-old English boy. One commentator wrote this of the first book: “With affectionate humor, Mr. Walpole tells the story of Jeremy and his two sisters, Helen and Mary Cole, who grow up in Polchester, a quiet English Cathedral town…. Mr. Walpole has given his narrative a rare double appeal, for it not only recreates for the adult the illusion of his own happiest youth, but it unfolds for the child-reader a genuine and moving experience with real people and pleasant things.” - Summary by Joseph Hergesheimer, Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation, 1919, p 38 and david wales

10Thirteen Travelers

By Hugh Walpole

The year is 1919 and peace has sprung upon the world after the unspeakable carnage of World War I. The place is Hortons, a building of expensive flats on Duke Street just off Piccadilly, London. Social structures are disintegrating, expectations are not being met, people are confused, life is different. Each story is about a person who lives or works at Hortons, all struggling to adjust to life as it has radically changed. Twelve short stories, published in 1921, by the early twentieth century very popular English writer, Hugh Walpole. - Summary by david wales

11Secret City

By Hugh Walpole

Written in the first person, The Secret City is a novel in three parts of a journey through post World War I Russia and the Revolution, during a period of Civil War and economic collapse. Our hero sets sail in 1916 and is swept up into the Revolution.The memories of a more opulent life remain.

“Quite a number of years ago there was an old rickety building on the rock above Seatown in Polchester, and it was one of a number in an old grass-grown square known as Pontippy Square. In this house at one time or another lived three old ladies,… It was a windy, creaky, rain-bitten dwelling-place for three old ladies….” (excerpt from the book) During the mid 1920s Walpole produced two of his best-known novels in the macabre vein that he drew on from time to time, exploring the fascination of fear and cruelty. The Old Ladies (1924) is a study of a timid elderly spinster exploited and eventually frightened to death by a predatory widow.

13Prelude To Adventure

By Hugh Walpole

Olva Dune is a Cambridge undergraduate who commits a murder and at that moment feels the presence of God. In a tour de force Walpole novelizes the Francis Thompson poem The Hound of Heaven, about a fearful soul pursued by an insistently loving God. (One could enrich the reading of the novel by first reading the poem (“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;… Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue…. Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,/ Save Me, save only Me?”). The psychologist Carl Jung, in a letter to the author, called the 1911 novel “a psychological masterpiece.” Hergesheimer on this novel: “So excellent is the versatility of Hugh Walpole that this writer of dignified and realistic and always beautiful pictures of life has among his books one with all the tension and strange plot of a Poe masterpiece… What happened is so filled with suspense that, very real and human though it is, the plot comes to have all the unexpectedness of the cleverest detective story…. Suspense--color of life--love--fear--triumph--they all mingle in an atmosphere as effective as the Cornish sea.” - Summary by David Wales

14Wooden Horse

By Hugh Walpole

Walpole’s first novel (1909), The Wooden Horse is the story of the Trojans, a family which accepted tranquilly the belief that they were the people for whom the world was created. But when Harry Trojan came home after twenty years in New Zealand, with the democracy learned by working his hands, he was the "wooden horse" who boldly carried into the Trojan walls a whole army of alien ideals, which made of that egotistic family a group of human beings content to be human. Interesting are his struggles against stubborn prejudice; dreamlike the pictures of the old Trojan house, rising from the edge of the gray Cornish cliff like an older cliff, yet surrounded by fragrant rose gardens; but what most distinguishes The Wooden Horse is its passionate adoration of the sea, the cliffs, the weather-worn old Cornish houses, where bearded men tell of haunted moors and the winds of the deep. - Summary by David Wales

15Castle of Otranto (Version 2)

By Horace Walpole

The Castle of Otranto is regarded as the first Gothic novel, a genre appealing to a taste for terror and set in a remote past when prodigies and magic can be imagined to have existed, with violent contrasts between purity and ungoverned passions. The author represents the tale as having been translated from a black letter Italian volume of the 15th century but describing much earlier events. This fictional antiquity and the depiction of mysterious wonders, dark subterranean passages, fearsome apparitions, marvelous coincidences, and especially a savage threat to spotless innocence are all typical of this genre, which does not assure a reader of a happy ending. (Summary by Thomas Copeland)

Is the father insane or merely sadistic, a man entombed in a spirit of malevolence? This 1925 novel by a perceptive observer explores the territory exceptionally.- Summary by david wales

17Gods and Mr Perrin

By Hugh Walpole

The book is probably better known under the title ‘Mr Perrin and Mr Traill’, later made into a well-known film in 1948. <br> Perrin and Traill are masters at a grim old-fashioned second-rate boarding public school in Cornwall – Perrin has been there many years and the youthful Traill has just arrived. The book concerns the growing antagonism between the two which turns into active dislike following an unfortunate incident and which eventually has devastating consequences. <br> The author vividly captures the dreadful nature of such a cloistered society and the stultifying effect it has on the pupils, their teachers and the other adults in the community. - Summary by Simon Evers

18Duchess of Wrexe

By Hugh Walpole

Rachel, a spirited young girl, has to choose between Francis Breton, her difficult cousin who has been disowned by the family, and Roddy Seddon, a conventional and rather boring but wealthy young man. She chooses Roddy but the marriage begins to collapse, and she meets Francis again. Looming over them is the spectre of the Duchess, Rachel’s grandmother, who rules the family and favours Roddy. Also in the mix is Lizzie Rand, secretary to Aunt Adela, who lives in the same house as Breton. <br> Set against the world of high society in London at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the book follows the characters as their lives are profoundly altered following a serious accident to one of them. (Summary by Simon Evers)

Hjalmar Johanson (novel, 1926) is a boyish unworldly Swedish body builder come to Walpole’s fictional cathedral town of Polchester. His name is “simplified” by the townsfolk to Harmer John. He is attracted to Polchester by the cathedral. He has a vision of transforming the town and its populace to a healthier and more beautiful state. He establishes a business, essentially a gymnasium, to help people become healthier. He envisions tearing down the slums along the river and rebuilding the area with more attractive and publicly healthier buildings. But not everyone shares his vision, especially the slumlords who make their money by renting the slum to those who are poor and vulnerable, those unable to afford anything better. Harmer John encounters xenophobia, jealousy, and malice. In an earlier story Walpole novelized the Francis Thompson poem The Hound Of Heaven about a fearful soul pursued by an insistently loving God. Some observers see in Harmer John a parallel to Francis of Assisi, that is, a naïve holy man opposed by the selfish worldliness around him. - Summary by david wales

20Green Mirror

By Hugh Walpole

Three generations of the Trenchard family, ruled over by the indomitable Mrs Trenchard, live together in comfortable domesticity until Katherine, the favourite daughter, meets and falls in love with Philip, back from some years in Russia, who threatens the whole stability of the family set up by thinking that he can marry her and thus take her away from them all. Philip and Katherine agree reluctantly to postpone their marriage for a full year. During this year, the family begins to splinter as more about Philip and his past becomes known. <br> With considerable humour, the book follows the ups and downs of the family relationships as the year progresses. (Summary by Simon Evers)

21Captives

By Hugh Walpole

A story of alienation from the society which holds one captive, told from the standpoint of a young woman whose life is suddenly disrupted, leading her into a stumbling progression through constrained social cliques and frustrated romantic attachments, haunted by religious shadows. (Summary by Peter Tucker)

22Black Star: A School Story for Boys

By Andrew H. Walpole

A school adventure set in Australia, with secret societies, bullies, mystery, a new student who calls everyone comrade, and sport, at least one handgun, and more. I only wish I could add an Australian accent! (Summary by KevinS)

Eleven short stories from The Windsor Magazine in the 1920s, Best British Short Stories of 1922, and Best British Short Stories of 1923. - Summary by David Wales

This 1926 collection of sixteen essays on religion by well-known people (mostly authors) in the early 20th century brings together articles written originally in the popular press of the time (The London Daily Express): Arnold Bennett, Hugh Walpole, Rebecca West; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Compton Mackenzie, J.D. Beresford; Israel Zangwill, H deVere Stacpoole, Henry Arthur Jones, and several prominent clergy. - summary by david wales

This 1927 work is the third and final in Walpole’s Jeremy series. (The others are Jeremy and Jeremy And Hamlet.) Jeremy’s home is in Polchester, a fictional English cathedral town in Walpole’s imagination. In this book Jeremy goes to boarding school. <br> “Jeremy at Crale [1927] has been my single attempt at a school-story. The genre is not an easy one for the very simple reason that a school-story can be only truly written by a boy who is still at school. It is all very well for us to say that we remember, but the things that we recall are for all of us the same things. There is the further difficulty that the sentiment of a boy's life is compounded of elements very dangerous and difficult for analysis…. The fact is that boys are both little beasts and little heroes, that the age of puberty is the terror of parents and headmasters, and that no one dares to speak frankly, even in these frank days, of what everyone knows to be true. However, these are dangerous matters….” (Walpole) - Summary by Hugh Walpole and david wales

A famous English author's thoughts on the power of reading. - Summary by David Wales