Showing results by narrator "Martha H. Weller" in All Categories

Three Lives was written in 1905/06 and published in 1909 at the author’s expense. The work consists of three independent novellas: The Good Anna, Melanctha, and The Gentle Lena. Each of the titular characters lives in Bridgepoint, a fictional town based on Baltimore.

Few of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime. Her posthumous fame is largely due to the efforts of her editors and supporters Thomas W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd.

Picture a cozy cottage nestled in the Pennsylvania mountains where a hard-working and virtuous young brother and sister live in quiet contentment. Add a love-struck doctor who is too timid to tell Norine, the sister, how much he adores her! He is about to announce his love when fate brings a stranger into their home, to be nursed back to health by the impressionable Norine. As the story unfolds, we learn the true natures of all we encounter. There are exciting twists and turns and not a few coincidental interventions! Will love and virtue triumph?

Lucy Holmes has been happily married for six months. Her husband is expected home from a business trip to Philadelphia when she receives the following cryptic telegram: "Come at once. Your husband found dead in his room this morning. Doctors say heart disease. Please telegraph." Foul play is suspected, but the search for means and motive is not such a straightforward process.

This classic murder mystery uses elements that have since become very common in crime literature - an abandoned house, a fugitive figure fleeing from the scene, and a dead body. In the house at Whispering Pines, which is supposed to be closed, the narrator discovers a dead body. On closer inspection, and much to his horror, he discovers that the corpse is that of his fiance. The figure fleeing the scene appears to be that of her sister. Unfortunately, when the police arrive and find the narrator still in the house they suspect that he is the murderer....

The Girls is the story of three spinsters living in Chicago—an aunt, her niece, and her niece’s niece. The aunt has memories of the Civil War, and all three women have adjusted to the outbreak of the First World War. Generational changes, particularly in regard to romantic attachments, are a central feature of the book, which is also a fascinating portrait of the Chicago lifestyle of the time. The emerging political and social power of women is also a significant feature of the story.

Writing this novel in 1923, H. G. Wells called it a “scientific fantasy.” He featured a utopia located in a parallel universe.

This novel is about a group of scientists that invent food that accelerates the growth of children turning them into giants upon becoming adults. There have been many B-movie adaptations. This is Wells at his finest with a science experiment gone wrong.

Diverging Roads, set sometime between 1912 and 1919, is one of Lane’s earliest published novels (1919). It is somewhat autobiographical and depicts the life of Helen Davies. We meet Helen when she is about to graduate from high school and is in love with a fellow student, Paul. Both of their families are struggling financially. Paul must support his widowed mother; he begins work immediately—and over the course of the novel proves to be a good, hard-working man whose greatest ambition is to provide for his loved ones, Helen included.

Ruth Thorne, a newspaper reporter in the city, comes to stay in the home of Jane Hathaway, an aunt whom she has never met. Aunt Jane is on a trip abroad but instructs Ruth via a letter to place a lantern in the attic window each night. No one knows why. A fellow reporter, Carl Winfield, is suffering from eye problems and has been sent to the same small town. Ruth and Carl are thrown together through a recommendation from Ruth’s boss and a gentle then passionate courtship ensues. In comic parallel, the maid Hepsey and the town carriage driver Joe pursue their own romance.

Dark of the Moon was first published in 1926. Its 92 poems are divided into 9 sections: There Will be Stars; Pictures of Autumn; Sand Drift; Portraits; Midsummer Nights; The Crystal Gazer; Berkshire Notes; Arcturus in Autumn; and The Flight. Teasdale repeatedly expresses the joy, wonder and freedom she feels when she is immersed in nature. Yet nature is not sufficient. She yearns for love and the rapture of “Two Minds” who have “freed themselves from cautious human clay.”

Writing a century later than Jane Austen, Whitby’s work examines many of the same themes: women and marriage, concepts of honor and pride, passion and love, and self-sacrifice. In The Awakening of Mary Fenwick, we find a naïve young woman who has been raised in a sheltered and isolated home by a grieving father.