Chronicles the life of Lady Georgiana Spencer, the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales.

From the moment it was first published in The New Yorker, this brilliant work of literary criticism aroused great attention. Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies. Features a new Afterword by Malcolm. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The definitive anthology of wisdom and wit about one of life’s most complex, intriguing, and personal subjects. When and whom do you marry? How do you keep a spouse content? Do all engaged couples get cold feet? How cold is so cold that you should pivot and flee? Where and how do children fit in? Is infidelity always wrong? In this volume, you won’t find a single answer to your questions about marriage; you will find hundreds. Spanning centuries and cultures, sources and genres, The Marriage Book offers entries from ancient history and modern politics, poetry and pamphlets, plays and songs, newspaper ads and postcards. It is an A to Z compendium, exploring topics from Adam and Eve to Anniversaries, Fidelity to Freedom, Separations to Sex. In this volume, you’ll hear from novelists, clergymen, sex experts, and presidents, with guest appearances by the likes of Liz and Dick, Ralph and Alice, Louis CK, and Neil Patrick Harris. Casanova calls marriage the tomb of love, and Stephen King calls it his greatest accomplishment. With humor, perspective, breadth, and warmth, The Marriage Book is sure to become a classic.

A rich, rollicking picture of late-eighteenth-century British aristocracy and the intimate story of a woman who for a time was its undisputed leader. Lady Georgiana Spencer, the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, achieved immediate celebrity at seventeen by marrying one of England's richest and most influential aristocrats, the Duke of Devonshire. Launched into a world of wealth and power, she quickly became the queen of fashionable society. But her public success concealed a personal life fraught with suffering, giving this vibrant story an astonishingly contemporary twist.

This Student Edition of Broken Glass is perfect for students of literature and drama and offers an unrivalled and comprehensive guide to Miller's play. It features an extensive introduction by Alan Ackerman which includes a chronology of Miller's life and times, a summary of the plot and commentary on the characters, themes, language, context and production history of the play. Together with over twenty questions for further study and detailed notes on words and phrases from the text, this is the definitive edition of the play. Set in Brooklyn in 1938, Broken Glass is Miller's moving study of marital relations, Jewish identity and anti-Semitism that won the Olivier Award for Best New Play in 1994. Sylvia Gellburg is stricken by a mysterious paralysis in her legs for which the doctor can find no cause. He soon realises that she is obsessed by the devastating news from Germany, where government thugs have begun smashing Jewish stores. But through a series of meetings with her husband Phillip he learns that this experience is intermeshed with their strange relationship and the deceptions and hostilities that lie at the heart of their marriage. Professor Alan Acklerman's expertly edited edition of the play provides a wide-ranging study of Kristallnacht, and of American and European responses to the Holocaust, the situation of Jews in America from the 1930s to the 1990s, the Great Depression and other Holocaust and Jewish drama.

Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne's life and an illuminating look at her afterlife in the popular imagination. Why is Anne so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? What did she really even look like?! And perhaps the most provocative questions concern Anne's death more than her life. How could Henry order the execution of a once beloved wife? Drawing on scholarship and popular culture Bordo probes the complexities of one of history's most infamous relationships. In her inimitable, straight-talking style Bordo dares to confront the established histories, stepping off the well-trodden paths of Tudoriana to expertly tease out the human being behind the myths.

The first full-length portrait of the marriage of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in more than fifty years, The Lincolns is a fascinating new work of American history by Daniel Mark Epstein, an award-winning biographer and poet known for his passionate understanding of the Civil War period. Although the private lives of political couples have in our era become front-page news, the true story of this extraordinary and tragic first family has never been fully told. The Lincolns eclipses earlier accounts with riveting new information that makes husband and wife, president and first lady, come alive in all their proud accomplishments and earthy humanity. Epstein gives a fresh close-up view of the couple’s life in Springfield, Illinois (of their twenty-two years of marriage, all but six were spent there). We witness the troubled courtship of an aristocratic and bewitching Southern belle and a struggling young lawyer who concealed his great ambition with self-deprecating humor; the excitement and confusion of the newlyweds as they begin their marriage in a small room above a tavern, and the early signs of Mary’s instability and Lincoln’s moodiness; their joyful creation of a home on the edge of town as Lincoln builds his law practice and makes his first forays into politics. We discover their consuming ambition as Lincoln achieves celebrity status during his famed debates with Stephen A. Douglas, which lead to Lincoln’s election to the presidency. The Lincolns’ ascent to the White House brought both dazzling power and the slow, secret unraveling of the couple’s unique bond. The Lincolns dramatizes certain well-known events with stunning new immediacy: Mary’s shopping sprees, her defrauding of the public treasury to increase her budget, and her jealousy, which made enemies for her and problems for the president. Yet she was also a brilliant hostess who transformed the shabby White House into a social center crucial to the Union’s success. After the death of their little boy, not a year after Lincoln took office, Mary turned for solace to spirit mediums, but her grief drove her to the edge of madness. In the end, there was little left of the Lincolns’ relationship save their enduring devotion to each other and to their surviving children. Written with enormous sweep and striking imagery, The Lincolns is an unforgettable epic set at the center of a crucial American administration. It is also a heartbreaking story of how time and adversity can change people, and of how power corrupts not only morals but affections. Daniel Mark Epstein’s The Lincolns makes two immortal American figures seem as real and human as the rest of us.

The official companion to the second season of the PBS/Masterpiece drama Victoria by award-winning creator and screenwriter Daisy Goodwin. More than 16 million viewers watched the first season of the Masterpiece presentation of Victoria, created and written by Daisy Goodwin—the highest-rated PBS drama in twenty years, second only to Downton Abbey . But what happened after the Queen married her handsome prince? Did they live happily ever after, or did their marriage, like so many royal marriages past and present, fizzle into a loveless round of duty? This all-new companion book by Daisy Goodwin and Sara Sheridan transports us to the private world of Victoria and Albert. Though first cousins, they could not have been more different: Victoria was impulsive, emotional, and capricious, Albert cautious, self-controlled, and logical. But together they forged a bond with each other and with their people that would change the world. Drawing on letters and diaries and fresh insights into royal history, this gorgeous book charts the constant ebb and flow of power within the couple’s surprisingly ardent and modern marriage. Sumptuously illustrated and full of rich insider detail, Victoria & Albert takes us behind the scenes of the magnificent TV drama, including fascinating, in-depth information on the actors, the props, and the costumes – and bringing an extraordinary royal marriage even more fully to life.

The present volume is the first collection of studies by Charles Mopsik to be published in English. It contains the contents of two separate volumes published in French, with an additional study which was published elsewhere. These seven studies focus on the function and character of sex and gender in Jewish Mysticism: (1) The Primeval Couple and the Primordial One in the Religions of the World; (2) The Masculine Woman; (3) Creation and Procreation: Beyond the Bounds of the Body - From the Hebrew Bible to Medieval Jewish Mysticism; (4) Genesis 1: 26-27: The Image of God, Man and Wife, and the Status of Women in the writings of the Early Kabbalists; (5) Genesis 2:24: 'They Become One Flesh': Several Interpretations by Medieval Jewish Mystics; (6) Union and Unity in the Kabbalah: The Proclamation of the Divine Unity and the Male/Female Couple; (7) The Secret of the Marriage of David and Batsheva.

"Peter Godwin's mother is dying. Born in England, and having spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe, she now lies on a hospital bed in the partitioned living room of his sister's London home. Peter has spent his life missing his Zimbabwean childhood, a longing that does not diminish as he reflects on his time as a journalist on the frontlines of combat around the world, or life in New York with his English wife and transatlantic children. In his mother's final months, he must come to terms with everything his family was and wasn't: the secrets they kept from one another, the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them, and the beauty of the wildly different places they called home. With generations of history behind him, Godwin lyrically brings us into the spaces which make us question and suffer, shows us how we can heal our own scars, and celebrate the lives we have among family and friends" -- Publisher's description.

One partner is Jewish, the other is a Christian. Do they celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, or both? Do they worship in a church or a synagogue? How will the children be raised? This essential resource addresses the concerns of interfaith couples, and includes interviews with intermarried couples, a discussion of intermarriage in history, and more.

Drawing on personal experience, history, literature, and in-depth interviews, the authors address the volatile issues that interfaith couples face as they discover the importance of religion and ethnicity in their lives

Unmarried pregnant women - and the men who caused their pregnancies - were targeted by Scottish church courts determined to maintain a godly society. Sin in the City provides unique glimpses into the thoughts, feelings and actions of ordinary men and women living in the Scottish cities of Aberdeen, Glasgow, Dundee and Edinburgh, where records are even richer than their rural counterparts.