18 books like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Brideshead Revisited
The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles…
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Under the Greenwood Tree or, The Mellstock quire
Under the Greenwood Tree is the story of the romantic entanglement between church musician, Dick Dewey, and the attractive new school mistress, Fancy Day. A pleasant romantic tale set in the Victorian era, Under the Greenwood Tree is one of Thomas Hardy's most gentle and pastoral novels.
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The Professor
The Professor was the first novel that Charlotte Bronte completed. Rejected by the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846 - Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights - it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Bronte's death. Like Villette (1853), The Professor is based on her experiences as a language student in Brussels in 1842.
Told from the point of…
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Villette, a novel
In time for the 200th anniversary of her birth, a Penguin Hardcover Classics edition of the book many believe to be Charlotte Brontë's crowning achievement.
With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially…
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Traveling Light
"Travel light and you can sing in the robber's face" was the best advice Summer Zwolenick ever received from her father, though she didn't recognize it at the time. Three years after the accident that ended her career as a ballerina, she is back in the familiar suburbs of Dayton, Ohio, teaching at a local high school. But it wasn't nostalgia that called Summer home. It was her need to spend…
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The Centaur
In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lost touch with his life. Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and his own relationship to Prometheus, The Centaur is one of John Updike's…
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The Stranger Diaries
"From the author of the beloved Ruth Galloway series, a modern gothic mystery for fans of Magpie Murders and The Lake House"--
Clare Cassidy is no stranger to murder. A high school English teacher specializing in the Gothic writer R.M. Holland, she teaches a course on it every year. But when one of Clare's colleagues and closest friends is found dead, with a line from R.M. Holland's most famous…
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Christy
The train taking nineteen-year-old teacher Christy Huddleston from her home in Asheville, North Carolina, might as well be transporting her to another world. The Smoky Mountain community of Cutter Gap feels suspended in time, trapped by poverty, superstitions, and century-old traditions.
But as Christy struggles to find acceptance in her new home, some see her — and her one-room school — as a…
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Just Beyond the Clouds
1 bestselling author Karen Kingsbury tells the heartwrenching story of Cody Gunner, a widower fighting for stability, and the woman who wants to help him trust again--even when trust is the most terrifying thing of all.Still aching over his wife's death, Cody Gunner can't bear the thought of also letting go of his Down's Syndrome brother, Carl Joseph. Cody wants his brother home, where he will be…
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Olivia
“Considered one of the most subtle and beautifully written lesbian novels of the century, this 1949 classic returns to print in a Cleis Press edition. Dorothy Strachey’s classic Olivia captures the awakening passions of an English adolescent sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris. The innocent but watchful Olivia develops an infatuation for her headmistress, Mlle. Julie,…
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The Magus
A startlingly original novel about a young English graduate who takes a position as a teacher at a private school on a small Greek island. Bored and lonely he spends his free hours wandering alone until he meets a wealthy and mysterious neighbour. Soon he finds himself a victim of this man’s increasingly bizarre psychological games and obsessed with a young woman who may or may not be a willing…
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Une si longue lettre
This novel is in the form of a letter, written by the widowed Ramatoulaye and describing her struggle for survival. A beautiful glimpse inside a woman's heart.
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All's Well That Ends Well
"For this updated edition, Alexander Leggatt has written a wholly new introduction to Russell Fraser's edition of one of Shakespeare's most puzzling, ambiguous and demanding plays. Leggatt's interest in performance informs his introduction and his account of the instability of the main characters. He offers a full, illustrated and thoughtful account of the play's critical and theatrical fortunes…
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My Dark Vanessa
"2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher. 2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa…
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Rob Roy
A historical novel first published in 1817, this was one of the first popular novels to attempt the use of regional dialect, in this case both Scottish highland and lowland dialects with a glossary of Scottish words. The story is set immediately before the Jacobite Rising of 1715 and follows the narrator, an English merchant, to Scotland in pursuit of a debt. Here he encounters Rob Roy MacGregor,…
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Le Rhin
Dans ces pages de voyage, Victor Hugo fait du Rhin et de ses villes un vaste livre de pierre, où Mayence, Cologne, Francfort, Worms et Rome révèlent les combats du temps, de l'histoire et de la modernité. L'arrivée par le chemin de fer, la douceur des paysages rhénans, les cathédrales, les cloîtres, les tombeaux et les ruines composent une méditation à la fois savante, lyrique et indignée sur la…
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Waverley; or, 'Tis sixty years since ...
"Edward Waverley is a young, cultured man whose sensibilities lead to his involvement in the Jacobite Rising of 1745. In his journey into Scotland, down to Derby, and back up again he explores the cultural and political geography of Great Britain." "Waverley; or, 'tis Sixty Years Since was Scott's first novel, but like its final chapter, 'A Postscript, which should have been a Preface', it…
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The History of the Life of Jonathan Wild, the Great
This book is a satire of Walpole that draws a parallel between Walpole and Jonathan Wild, the infamous gang leader and highwayman. He implicitly compares the Whig party in Parliament with a gang of thieves being run by Walpole, whose constant desire to be a "Great Man" (a common epithet for Walpole) should culminate only in the antithesis of greatness: being hanged.
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