The Oxford Book of English Love Stories - Tapa blanda

"Sophisticated and simple, sometimes comic and often moving."--Women's Weekly "Love's endlessly fascinating possibilities and varied forms --virginal love, adulterous love, gay love, and so on, are robustly portrayed in a collection which also succeeds in showing how the twenty-eight authors included, approach their theme according to both the social and literary conventions of the their day."--Helen Rennie, Oxford Times "Sophisticated and simple, sometimes comic and often moving."--Women's Weekly "Love's endlessly fascinating possibilities and varied forms --virginal love, adulterous love, gay love, and so on, are robustly portrayed in a collection which also succeeds in showing how the twenty-eight authors included, approach their theme according to both the social and literary conventions of the their day."--Helen Rennie, Oxford Times "Sophisticated and simple, sometimes comic and often moving."--Women's Weekly "Love's endlessly fascinating possibilities and varied forms --virginal love, adulterous love, gay love, and so on, are robustly portrayed in a collection which also succeeds in showing how the twenty-eight authors included, approach their theme according to both the social and literary conventions of the their day."--Helen Rennie, Oxford Times "Sophisticated and simple, sometimes comic and often moving."--Women's Weekly "Love's endlessly fascinating possibilities and varied forms --virginal love, adulterous love, gay love, and so on, are robustly portrayed in a collection which also succeeds in showing how the twenty-eight authors included, approach their theme according to both the social and literary conventions of the their day."--Helen Rennie, Oxford Times

Fiction has been trying for years both to promote and subvert the cliches love encourages. We turn to literature to learn what love is and what it should be, and readers of this collection will find consolation and inspiration in equal measure from some of the sharpest observers of this most essential human emotion. In tracing the lineaments of "English love" through the fiction of 200 years we can see something of its infinite variety and of the shifting rules of the game. Sylvia Plath seems closer to Aphra Behn than to Elizabeth Gaskell or even Thomas Hardy in her concept of feminine modesty, while violence, or sheer incomprehension, enter the definition in the worlds of D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. Romantic love is at the heart of the "love story" and these stories, while taking love as their subject, do not always follow the conventional route. Bittersweet endings, ironic angles on traditional platitudes and other surprises make the insights of writers such as Anne Ritchie, Somerset Maugham or V.S. Pritchett always fresh and challenging.