Böcker utgivna av Michael Walmer

Stella Benson's debut was one of the most acclaimed of her generation:"e;One of the brightest, most original, and best written books that have come my way for a long time,"e; wrote Sir Henry Lucy. "e;As the mature work of an experienced author it would have been a remarkable achievement: being 'the first book of a new writer' it is an astonishing performance,' hailed the reviewer from The Daily Graphic. In this incredibly original satirical novel we are introduced to the two main characters as The Gardener and The Suffragette, and so they remain throughout. Inhabiting a huge first chapter of 302 pages and then only a tiny second one of 8 pages, these two are wildly comic and disturbingly real at one and the same time. Benson's cheekiness in commenting directly to the reader on the progress of the story, the saltiness of her slightly cynical view of the world and its ways, and the strange newness of the tale she was telling meant that, on first publication in 1915, the literary world's curiosity was most certainly piqued. Both of them are the beautifully mixed, endearingly crazy creations of Benson's unusual talent, which spins its fizzing wit on a sixpence, creating absurd comedy and wise satire out of thin air. Delivering, in its fools' progress, one of the significant debuts of its era and one of the funniest novels of the suffragette movement in one package, I Pose was hailed immediately as a classic of a new kind, establishing Stella Benson as a fresh genius of the human spirit, in all its poses.

They were in the dogs' cemetery. Lady Castleyard tapped a little crooked cross. "One fears," she said, "that Georgia must have poisoned them all for the sake of their epitaphs." Welcome to one of the most distinctive styles in English literature. Ronald Firbank was an acute observer; his famous way of taking down extraordinary snatches of conversation, or pithy single sayings, on slips of paper, and then including them in his novels when an opportunity arose, anticipated modern experimental cut-up techniques by half a century. His was also a rare wit: Lady Barrow lolled languidly in her mouse-eaten library, a volume of mediaeval Tortures (with plates) propped up against her knee. In fancy, her husband was well pinned down and imploring for mercy at Figure 3. How eagerly, now, he proffered her the moon! How he decked her out with the stars! How he overdressed her! Coldly she considered his case. "Release you? Certainly not! Why should I?" she murmured comfortably, transferring him to the acuter pangs of 9. In this amazing first novel, published in 1915, well-connected Mrs Shamefoot is searching for some sort of immortality, and has decided that she requires a dedicatory stained-glass window to be designed and built into a cathedral of which she approves. Engendering consternation all around at her daring, one-eyed pursuit of her aim, and casting wide her net, she finally settles on the church in Ashringford, and events conspire with her: in a storm, some scissors are left on the scaffolding around it, the lightning catches them, and a great part of the wall comes crashing down. She does not miss the opportunity. With a huge cast of astonishingly overdrawn characters, utterings and situations, Firbank comedically depicts a social world made largely of women and their talk: ladies both voluble and shy; daughters both wild and domesticated; spinsters and widows with obsessions, or the cutting tongues made to spike them; servants whose opinions are as strong as their mistresses'. These all swirl around Mrs Shamefoot, approving, disapproving, commenting on each other and her in a turmoil of zesty snippets. The results are like nothing else. Ronald Firbank was born in London in 1886, the son of a wealthy MP and landowner. He attended Trinity Hall in Cambridge but left without completing his degree. His first book, containing two stories, was published in 1905, after which he published eight full-length novels, and more stories and plays. Ill with lung disease for most of his life, he died in Rome in 1926, at the age of 40.

The death of Oscar Wilde in 1900 left the position of The Wittiest Man in the World open and up for grabs. There seemed no clear inheritor. Then, over the next couple of years, in the pages of the Westminster Gazette, there slowly emerged someone whose political satires and sketches of society brought the Wildean barb screaming into the new century. He was a man by the name of Hector Munro, but very few knew that. All his pieces were signed with a name now synonymous with wit - simply Saki. - "Youth should suggest innocence." "But never act on the suggestion." - "Scandal is merely the compassionate allowance which the gay make to the humdrum." Saki's savage sketches of society were initially centred around one character, uncannily like himself. Reginald is dangerous. Brutally honest, not interested in mediocrity or convention, he cuts a hilarious swathe through more polite circles. These 15 pieces were first collected together in 1904. - "Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent." - "The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other." - "I hate posterity - it's so fond of having the last word." Saki (Hector Munro) was born in Burma in 1870. He was sent to boarding school in Devon and Bedfordshire. Following his father into the Imperial Police, he was posted back to Burma. After contracting malaria, he returned to England where his writing career blossomed. When war broke out in 1914, he refused a commission and joined up as an ordinary trooper. During the Battle of the Ancre in 1916, whilst resting in a crater, he was shot by a German sniper. His output included some of the funniest stories in the English language, as well as plays, essays and two novels.

It is a long and golden summer in the Edwardian period. London is abuzz with gentlemen in tall hats and ladies in flowing silk, some with money, and others who want it badly. Love and marriage are the great game, but the adventure is vastly varied, depending on who is playing. Creatures of wit find it their most impressive subject; creatures of love are either pinnacled or torn apart by its demands. Felicity, Sylvia and Savile Crofton, aged 25, 20 and 16 respectively, are deep in the melee. Felicity is married to Lord Chetwode, the man of her dreams, and is largely happy, but she is already feeling deeply the falling-off of contact as he pursues horseflesh and antiques across the country in ever-longer stays away. Her younger sister Sylvia is very much in the market, according to her father, who has many ideas of whom she might marry, but particularly favours a Greek millionaire, Mr Ridokanaki. He has no idea that her great love is his penniless secretary, Frank Woodville. Their brother Savile, on holiday from Eton, has not only the spirited attentions of young Dolly Clive to contend with, but also his great passion for an opera singer, whom he loves from afar. Somehow, all their problems must be brought to a satisfactory conclusion. A typically confident Savile tries to engineer a solution, but in the end it is love itself which cuts through. This mischievously witty tale of love and intrigue, the author's first, was published in 1907. Ada Leverson (nee Beddington) was born in 1862. She married Ernest Leverson at the age of 19, against her parents' consent, but the marriage was not a success. She became a contributor to several literary and artistic journals including Black and White, St Stephen's Review and, most notably, The Yellow Book in the 1890s. It was at this time, after she published a brilliantly successful sketch parody of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, that Oscar Wilde desired to meet her, and dubbed her The Sphinx. They became the greatest of friends, and she was instrumental in helping him after the disaster of his trial, when many others deserted him. Her six sparklingly witty novels were published between 1907 and 1916. She died in 1933.

Deep in George Sand's own natal countryside of Berri in central France, Valentine de Raimbault, daughter of the chateau, and Benedict Lhery, cousin and adopted son of one of its tenant farmers, meet and fall headlong in love. Though they are very young, she 18 and he 22, both are already engaged to be married: he to his cousin, a beautiful and imperious girl who sees him as a stepping stone to comfort and security, and she to a dissolute diplomat who needs her wealth to pay his gigantic gambling debts. They must both first realize the extraordinary power of their feelings, and then enter a terrible battle with relatives, expectations and conventions, where their difference in rank proves a massive obstacle. Their union will indeed be hard won, if it can be. As they fight to understand and fulfil their love, the world bends, breaks and remakes itself around them many times. In the uncertainty, one of them unwillingly marries; the other rejects passionately the idea of a life united to any but their loved one. Lives are lost, arguments are precipitated into great conflicts, scores are settled and new ones created, intrigues are pursued, misunderstandings are promoted, long-held secrets are finally revealed. It is only when a chance mistake proves disastrously final that their tragic love finds its whole meaning, that the pattern they are creating in their lives fulfils its extraordinary design. This intensely passionate novel, the author's second, was first published in 1832.