Hazel Holt has published 19 Mrs. Malory mysteries in the tradition of Barbara Pym and has admirers around the world. My Dear Charlotte is a departure from her other work. It is a novel-in-letters written "with the assistance of Jane Austen's letters." From the Introduction by Jan Fergus: My Dear Charlotte is a great British mystery set in the early 1800s and infused throughout with the actual language and style of Jane Austen, one of the world's great stylists and comic writers. Of course, you don't have to love Austen to love this book. If you enjoy detective novels, you will find here a completely satisfying murder mystery, coupled with a romance (or more than one, in fact). My Dear Charlotte gives you, in addition to mystery and romance, a portrait of the world of the English gentry at around 1815, immediately after the defeat of Napoleon-its manners and its moral certainty. As in Austen, Napoleon is not directly mentioned, but his shadow is there: one brother of the heroine is a sailor and the other a junior diplomat at the Congress of Vienna. It's the social world at home that is central, however, with its balls, visits, courtships, gossip, and of course murder, underlining the tensions and rifts within that apparently civilized society.

This concluding volume covers the final two and a half years of Dickens's life: his reading tours in America and around England, the writing of Edwin Drood (left unfinished on his sudden death), and his characteristic involvement in scores of different interests and in writing to literally hundreds of correspondents.

From the best-selling author of The Pursuit of Love and The Sun King comes a collection of her witty letters to Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Robert Byron, and other notable correspondents. 15,000 first printing.

John Henry Newman (1801-90) was at the height of his position in the Church of England in 1839, when he first began to feel doubts concerning the claims of the Anglican Church. His editorship of the British Critic took up a great deal of time, but he was greatly encouraged by its increasing sales. Uncomfortable with his position as Vicar of St Mary's, Oxford Newman was considering giving up the position at the end of 1840. This volume covers a significant period in Newman's life, with a background of social ferment and political tension: the Corn Laws, Chartism, an inexperienced monarch, weak government, and foreign problems. Contemporary writers such as Carlyle attracted Newman's attention, and university reform was a live issue.

<DIV>Behan's friends and relatives, and people in his literary circle, have claimed he was not a prolific letter-writer. Even Behan himself has been quoted as saying, "Whoever writes my biography will get no help from my letters. I never write any." But in fact there is a substantial body of letters to and from Behan, who not only corresponded with seventeen periodicals but wrote to relatives, friends, IRA colleagues, civil servants, theatrical directors, publicans, and complete strangers. As in the case of Oscar Wilde, the search for Behan's letters has been hampered by their dispersal to widely scattered and unexpected places. The surviving letters that Mikhail was able to locate, however, proved well worth the trouble it took to uncover them. In addition to providing a vital record of one of the giants of Irish literature, Behan's letters -- especially those written without thought of publication -- give a far better sense of his exuberant verbal style than his plays or poetry. Mikhail introduces each letter and explains the circumstances in which it was written. He also annotates the letters, elucidating difficulties, noting the location and ownership of the letters whenever possible, and giving biographical information about the correspondents. The Letters of Brendan Behan also includes four poems that appear here for the first time, as well as extracts from early writings never before published. Numerous letters to editors, refused publication because of their outspokenness, are published here for the first time, and others, previously cut or censored, now appear in their original form. For anyone interested in Irish literature or contemporary drama -- and especially for readers and scholars of Behan's work -- The Letters of Brendan Behan is an invaluable collection.

Clean text. Tight binding. Unclipped dust jacket. Map of James' London on front end papers. Map of Alix's Berlin on back end papers. Illustrated. 2 Appendices. Glossary of German and French terms. Index. Footnotes. This collection of letters chronicles a one-year period when the Stracheys were separated while she underwent psychoanalysis in Berlin and he remained in England. Strachey was the official translator of the English Standard Edition of Freud's works and a leading British psychoanalyst; his wife Alix was also a psychoanalyst.

<P>The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley reveal a remarkable woman living in a remarkable age. They date from October 1814--shortly after her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley--through September 1850, five months before her death. Her correspondents' names are familiar--Shelley himself, Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, General Lafayette, Sir Walter Scott--and the letters abound with anecdotes about such eminent figures as her parents (William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft), Keats, Washington Irving, and Charles and Mary Lamb.

Publication of the widely acclaimed, three-volume edition of Mary Shelley's letters was completed in 1988, containing all 1,276 of her known extant letters. Now Betty T. Bennett has selected 230 of those letters to give an overview of Mary Shelley's life as she was seeing it, living it, and recording it. Bennett also includes an introductory essay that sketches a portrait of Mary Shelley, her world, and her place in the history of literature and letters.