Anne Elliot, age twenty-seven as the book opens, is an older than usual heroine for Austen. As a very young woman, she had been deeply in love with Frederick Wentworth, a handsome young naval officer of no fortune and uncertain prospects who loved her deeply. The two became engaged, but Lady Russell, acting on behalf of Anne’s deceased mother, persuaded Anne to break off her engagement, convincing her that Wentworth could never be happy within their elegant family or make her happy, since she would be an outcast from the family and from the society she had always known. Anne has forever regretted the fact that she allowed herself to be persuaded, and for the past eight years has not been attracted to anyone else, turning down a marriage proposal which had been regarded as ideal. When Sir Walter Elliot, in dire financial straits, decides to lease Kellynch to Admiral Croft and remove the family to Bath, Anne has no idea that this will bring Frederick Wentworth back into her life. Wentworth is the brother-in-law of Admiral Croft, who has moved into Kellynch.
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When Bostonian John Quincy Winterslip is sent to Hawaii to retrieve his elderly Aunt Minerva, who has stayed with relatives in Hawaii long past the time she (and they) had originally intended, he fully expects to return home quickly. Though his family tree has long had “wanderers,” one of whom has settled in Hawaii, John Quincy knows HE is far too sensible to succumb to Hawaii’s charms. His Boston Brahmin roots, his successful investment business, and his “appropriate,” family-approved fiancee are all luring him back home. Shortly after his arrival in Honolulu, however, his uncle Dan Winterslip, with whom he is staying, is murdered in his Waikiki home. Assigned to investigate this murder is Honolulu Detective Charlie Chan. First published in 1925, the House Without a Key broke new ground in American publishing by starring an Asian detective.
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Always concerned with issues of class, social injustice, and employment, Dickens shows in Hard Times, written in 1854, a broader concern with the philosophies and economic movements which underlie those issues. Three parallel story lines reflect a broad cross-section of society and its thinking. Mr. Thomas Gradgrind runs a school founded upon the principles of rationalism, a belief in the importance of facts, the antithesis of romantic “fancy” and imagination. Basically a good man, he denies the importance of emotion–for himself, his children, and his students. Gradgrind’s friend, Mr. Bounderby, is a banker and factory owner, aged fifty, who claims to have risen from the gutter to his present lofty position purely through hard work. The third story line involves Stephen Blackpool, a worker in Bounderby’s factory, trapped in a marriage to an alcoholic who periodically appears and extorts money from him. As the story lines overlap and intersect, often with consummate irony, Dickens keeps a light enough hand to prevent the story from becoming a polemic, though his criticism of hypocrisy, corruption, and “progress” at the expense of humanity is clear.
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A handsome young man who finds himself the sole support of his mother and sister after his father’s death, Nicholas Nickleby is hopeful that his uncle, Ralph Nickleby, a weathy speculator in London, will assist the unfortunate family in its hour of need. Ralph’s cruel response, however, is to make Nicholas the assistant headmaster at a notoriously abusive school in northern England and to make his beautiful sister a seamstress and part-time hostess at his own parties. There she is subjected to innuendo and to the drunken intentions of men whose accounts help keep Ralph a wealthy man.
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In what may be her most exciting and original novel, George Eliot weaves two completely different plots, one of which is a uniquely sympathetic and fully developed story with Jewish protagonists. Presenting no Jewish stereotypes, as we see in Dickens (in Oliver Twist and other novels) and even Trollope (with The Way We Live Now (Barnes & Noble Classics)), she depicts characters who have, in one case, tried to avoid their heritage and in another have been drawn irrevocably to a religion and culture with which they have had no previous contact.
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