"Magpies Workbooks" provide valuable reading and language support for the "Magpies Storybooks" at Stages 8 and 9. The range of activities to accompany each storybook encourages children to look more closely at the stories, to focus on comprehension, aspects of language and grammar; develop greater r[...]

First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the second edition, 'to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern'. He gives us a se[...]

During the 1790s, with Ireland in political crisis, Maria Edgeworth made a surprisingly rebellious choice: in Castle Rackrent, her first novel, she adopted an Irish Catholic voice to narrate the decline of a family from her own Anglo-Irish class. Castle Rackrent's narrator, Thady Quirk, gives us fo[...]

In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's The Bostonians, Castle shows how a lesbian [...]

The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, and reason and nonsense, K.'s struggles in the absurd, labyrinthine world where h[...]

'They won't know you, the you that's hidden somewhere in the castle of your skin' Nine-year-old G. leads a life of quiet mischief crab catching, teasing preachers and playing among the pumpkin vines. His sleepy fishing village in 1930s Barbados is overseen by the English landlord who lives on th[...]

History comes alive in this incredible children's illustrated book about castles. Slicing through different areas of a medieval fortress, extraordinary views reveal the people busy inside, and preparing for battle as an enemy army approaches. Packed with facts, you'll find out what it takes to build[...]

The Gothic novel emerged out of the romantic mist alongside a new conception of the home as a separate sphere for women. Looking at novels from Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" to Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the relationship between these two phenomena of midd[...]

This enlightening, entertaining, and intriguing novel begins as a story within a story--or a story within a trunk. A Frenchman--our narrator, presumably the author Michel Jouvet, or a literary version of himself--buys an antique chest with brass fittings, labeled with the initials HLS and a partiall[...]

Christmas in the Boss's Castleby Scarlet Wilson Chambermaid Grace Ellis loves Christmas, but after losing her beloved grandmother, she'll be spending this festive season working. So when her boss, Finlay `Scrooge' Armstrong offers her a magical Christmas in Scotland, it's a welcome distract[...]

When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the Corps of Discovery on their epic journey across the American West, they were acting not only as territorial explorers but as diplomatic emissaries from the young United States to the Native American people they encountered. Castle McLaughlin's fresh ex[...]