The Bigamy Plot

The Bigamy Plot PDF

Author: Maia McAleavey

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-05-18

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1107103169

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This study explores the prevalence of bigamy in Victorian fiction to challenge traditional understanding of the period's social and narrative conventions.

The Bigamy Plot

The Bigamy Plot PDF

Author: Maia McAleavey

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-05-18

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1316368882

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The courtship plot dominates accounts of the Victorian novel, but this innovative study turns instead to a narrative phenomenon that upends its familiar conventions: the bigamy plot. In hundreds of novels, plays, and poems published in Victorian Great Britain, husbands or wives thought dead suddenly reappear to their newly remarried spouses. In the sensation fiction of Braddon and Collins, these bigamous revelations lead to bribery, arson, and murder, but the same plot operates in the canonical fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, and Hardy. These authors employ bigamy plots to destabilize the apparently conventional form and values of the Victorian novel. By close examination of this plot, including an index of nearly 300 bigamy novels, Maia McAleavey makes the case for a historical approach to narrative, one that is grounded in the legal and social changes of the period but that runs counter to our own formal and cultural expectations.

The Bigamist

The Bigamist PDF

Author: Mary Turner Thomson

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2011-07-15

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1780572727

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In April 2006, Mary Turner Thomson received a call that blew her life apart. The woman on the other end of the line told her that Will Jordan, Mary's husband and the father of her two younger children, had been married to her for fourteen years and they had five children together. The Bigamist is the shocking true story of how one man manipulated an intelligent, independent woman, conning her out of £200,000 and leaving her to bring up the children he claimed he could never have. It's a story we all think could never happen to us, but this shameless con man has been doing the same thing to various other women for at least 27 years, spinning a tangled web of lies and deceit to cover his tracks. How far would you go to help the man you love? How far would he go to deceive you? And what would you do when you found out it was all a lie?

Dickens and the Rise of Divorce

Dickens and the Rise of Divorce PDF

Author: Kelly Hager

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1317151178

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Questioning a literary history that, since Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, has privileged the courtship plot, Kelly Hager proposes an equally powerful but overlooked narrative focusing on the failed marriage. Hager maps the legal history of marriage and divorce, providing crucial background as she reveals the prevalence of the failed-marriage plot in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels. Dickens's novels emerge as representative case studies in their preoccupations with the disintegration of marriage, the far-reaching and disastrous effects of the doctrine of coverture, and the comic, spectacular, and monstrous possibilities afforded by the failed-marriage plot. Setting his narratives alongside the writings of liberal reformers like John Stuart Mill and the seemingly conservative agendas of Caroline Norton, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Sarah Stickney Ellis, Hager also offers a more contextualized account of the competing strands of the Woman Question. In the course of her revisionist readings of Dickens's novels, Hager uncovers a Dickens who is neither the conservative agent of the patriarchy nor a novelistic Jeremy Bentham, and reveals that tipping the marriage plot on its head forces us to adjust our understanding of the complexities of Victorian proto-feminism.

Silver Sparrow

Silver Sparrow PDF

Author: Tayari Jones

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2020-02-19

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1786077973

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A breathtaking tale of family secrets, from the international bestselling author of An American Marriage AN OBSERVER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A SAINSBURY'S MAGAZINE CHRISTMAS GIFT LISTING A GUARDIAN 'BEST BOOK OF 2020 TO SUPPORT INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS' A BOOKSELLER SMALL PUBLISHERS 2020 TOP 20 A Most Anticipated Book for 2020 according to The Sunday Times, the FT and the Guardian 'My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist.' SECRETS Dana and Chaurisse are sisters, bound together by the life-changing secret of their father's double life. LIES Only one of them knows the truth. When they do finally meet and form a friendship, the fragile balance of ignorance and silence that has kept James' secrets safe for so long threatens to explode. HOPE This soulful story of friendship and sisterhood paints an unforgettable picture of the messy knots that bind families together, from the prize-winning author of An American Marriage.

The Flight of Birds

The Flight of Birds PDF

Author: Lobb, Joshua

Publisher: Sydney University Press

Published: 2019-02-01

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1743322658

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The Flight of Birds is a novel in twelve stories, each of them compelled by an encounter between the human and animal worlds. The birds in these stories inhabit the same space as humans, but they are also apart, gliding above us. The Flight of Birds: A Novel in Twelve Stories explores what happens when the two worlds meet. Joshua Lobb’s stories are at once intimate and expansive, grounded in an exquisite sense of place. The birds in these stories are variously free and wild, native and exotic, friendly and hostile. Humans see some of them as pets, some of them as pests, and some of them as food. Through a series of encounters between birds and humans, the book unfolds as a meditation on grief and loss, isolation and depression, and the momentary connections that sustain us through them. Underpinning these interactions is an awareness of climate change, of the violence we do to the living beings around us, and of the possibility of transformation. The Flight of Birds will change how you think about the planet and humanity’s place in it.

Missing

Missing PDF

Author: Jasmine Cresswell

Publisher: Harlequin

Published: 2012-10-15

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1460304810

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For twenty-five years, multimillionaire businessman Ron Raven played the loving husband and father -- to two very different households. But when Ron disappears, his deception is revealed. Now both families are left with questions, while the man who holds the answers is...MISSING. Megan Raven is desperate to save her mother's Wyoming ranch, used as collateral on a three-million-dollar loan -- money that disappeared with Ron. Worse, the loan is being called in by Georgia bank manager Adam Fairfax -- brother to Ron's other wife. Brought together by their families' turmoil, Megan and Adam head south of the border in search of the missing millions. But what they find is a whole new web of lies, secrecy and greed.

Favorite Wife

Favorite Wife PDF

Author: Susanne K. Schmidt

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2009-03-03

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 1599217376

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A riveting memoir of life inside one of North America's most notorious polygamous cults.

The 19th Wife

The 19th Wife PDF

Author: David Ebershoff

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2008-08-05

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13: 1588367487

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Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain. Sweeping and lyrical, spellbinding and unforgettable, David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife combines epic historical fiction with a modern murder mystery to create a brilliant novel of literary suspense. It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of a family’s polygamous history is revealed, including how a young woman became a plural wife. Soon after Ann Eliza’s story begins, a second exquisite narrative unfolds–a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father’s death. And as Ann Eliza’s narrative intertwines with that of Jordan’ s search, readers are pulled deeper into the mysteries of love and faith. Praise for The 19th Wife “This exquisite tour de force explores the dark roots of polygamy and its modern-day fruit in a renegade cult . . . Ebershoff brilliantly blends a haunting fictional narrative by Ann Eliza Young, the real-life 19th “rebel” wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young, with the equally compelling contemporary narrative of fictional Jordan Scott, a 20-year-old gay man. . . . With the topic of plural marriage and its shattering impact on women and powerless children in today's headlines, this novel is essential reading for anyone seeking understanding of the subject.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A Circle of Wives

A Circle of Wives PDF

Author: Alice LaPlante

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2014-03-04

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0802192742

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From the New York Times–bestselling author of Half Moon Bay. “Marriage is as mysterious as murder in LaPlante’s captivating psychological thriller” (People). An Indie Next Pick A LibraryReads Selection An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Mysteries & Thrillers) A Daily Candy Best Book of March One of More magazine’s “Five Thrillers Not to Read After Dark” When Dr. John Taylor turns up dead in a hotel room, the local police uncover enough incriminating evidence to suspect foul play. Det. Samantha Adams, whose Palo Alto beat usually covers petty crimes, is innocently thrown into a high-profile case that is more complicated than any she has faced before. A renowned reconstructive surgeon and a respected family man, Dr. Taylor was beloved and admired. But beneath his perfect façade was a hidden life—in fact, multiple lives. Dr. Taylor was married to three very different women in three separate cities. As the circumstances surrounding his death emerge, Detective Adams finds herself tracking down a murderer through a tangled web of marital deception and revenge. New York Times–bestselling author Alice LaPlante’s haunting and complex novel of family secrets dissects—with scalpel-like agility—the intricacies of desire and commitment, trust and jealousy. “Exhilarating and smart, A Circle of Wive is a wild ride of love, loss, marriage and murder, with a finale that’s provocative, thrilling and grand. It all shows that while some deaths are a mystery, so, too, are some loves.” —San Francisco Chronicle