Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

The Oxford Book of English Love Stories, Hardback Book

Hardback

Description

Love, so the song goes, is a many-splendoured thing, and fiction has been trying for years both to promote and subvert the clichés it 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. Simple or sophisticated, sometimes comic and often very moving, these stories bring a delightful perspective to the mysteries of the English in love.

Information

£89.00

 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information