Extracts from Fiction
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Fiction’
Mary Mason could not forgive herself for a past misdeed.
Lady Mary Mason inherited Orley Farm from her husband, Joseph Mason of Groby Park, Yorkshire, who was forty-five years her senior and had a son of his own. A bitter, damaging court-case ensued. The Will was upheld, but later on Mary privately admitted she had forged it, and she never forgave herself.
Mr Snawley has two stepsons he would like to offload, and Mr Squeers seems just the right person to help him.
Mr Wackford Squeers, headmaster of Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire, is in London looking for clients. He is approached at the Saracen’s Head by a Mr Snawley, step-father to two small boys, who is looking for a cheap, far-off boarding school with none of those ill-judged holidays ‘that unsettle children’s minds so’.
Kate Nickleby must bite her lip as she experiences snobbery for the first time.
After falling on hard times, Kate Nickleby, daughter of a country gentleman, has gratefully accepted a job in a dressmaker’s. But a mother and daughter have come in, and being in an ill temper have chosen to take it out on the new assistant.
Harriet Smith’s school gave her a grounding in good sense that even Emma Woodhouse could not quite overthrow.
‘Emma’, like Jane Austen’s other novels, is essentially about the effects of bad education, that is, an upbringing from which good role-models have been absent, and in which theory is an accepted substitute for results. Here, she describes Harriet Smith’s school - the one she attended before ‘handsome, clever, and rich’ Emma Woodhouse tried to improve her.
Lady Blakeney agrees to spy for the French Revolutionary government in return for her brother’s life.
In exchange for her brother Armand’s life, Marguerite, Lady Blakeney, is reluctantly playing the spy at a society ball. Citizen Chauvelin, of the French Revolutionary government’s secret police, wants her to find out what she can about the mysterious ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ who has been rescuing prisoners from the guillotine.
Elizabeth Bennet began to wonder if being Mr Darcy’s wife might have had its compensations.
Elizabeth Bennet has recently turned down a proposal of marriage from Mr Darcy; now, having recently visited his snobbish aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, she is on a guided tour round Mr Darcy’s own magnificent country house in Derbyshire, ‘Pemberley’.