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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.
Don Quixote seizes his chance to capture a giant for his lady-love, Dulcinea.
Quexana is a woolly-headed, Spanish country gentleman, bordering fifty, from La Mancha, southeast of Madrid. Bewitched by tales of romance, he has dubbed himself Don Quixote, Knight, and set out in search of ‘adventures’ with his companion Sancho Panza. His quest is to capture a giant as a love-offering to his lady Dulcinea (a pleasing fantasy inspired by an old flame) and he has just been promising Sancho his own realm too.
William Dewy runs into a menacing bull, but his soothing music doesn’t seem to be soothing enough.
In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Tess is milking a cow for dairy farmer Mr Crick (he remembered her mother, herself a dairymaid) and finding it rather restful. As she milks, the dairy lads and maids begin a song. ‘You should get your harp, sir’ ventures one lad, a little out of breath; ‘not but what a fiddle is best.’ And Mr Crick shares a story that shows just how right he is.
If little Maggie Tulliver is going to get her hair cut, it’s going to be done on her own terms.
Little Maggie Tulliver’s aunts have called round, and she has been subjected to repeated criticism for her heavy shock of unruly black hair. Even her father has ventured that “it ’ud be as well if Bessy ’ud have the child’s hair cut, so as it ’ud lie smooth.” Rebellion rises, and Maggie beckons to her older brother Tom.
Elizabeth Bennet stonewalls her way through a disagreeable encounter with Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
In Pride and Prejudice, Lady Catherine de Bourgh has heard that her wealthy nephew, Fitzwilliam Darcy, is planning to propose to Elizabeth Bennet, instead of her own daughter. She has raced to Longbourn, Elizabeth’s home, to demand an explanation of the ‘impossible’, but Lizzy sees no reason to be defensive.
The story-teller recalls his first meeting with Nastenka, and the man who brought them together.
‘White Nights’ (1848) is set in St Petersburg during those enchanted June nights when the sun barely dips below the horizon. It was on such a night that the unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky’s tale caught his first glimpse of the woman he came to know as Nastenka, and he was far too highly strung to resist the spell.
Silas Marner has to harden his heart and teach little Eppie a lesson she will remember.
Silas Marner has suffered griefs enough to break any man. His salvation has been a little girl: the bachelor had found her in his home, and her mother dead in the snow outside, one New Year’s Eve. It wasn’t easy to juggle a weaver’s work and a curious toddler. One day the artful creature found his scissors, snipped through the linen-band harness he had made for her safe-keeping, and wandered unnoticed out of the cottage.