Jonathan Chandler Jonathan Chandler, also referred to as Mr. Chandler, commits suicide on Christmas Eve in front of the whole Chandler family, including live-in maid Lutie and Little Henry Chandler. Afterward, the Chandlers pay off a number of officials to make sure the incident is recorded as an accident in the public records. This episode…
Category: Literature
The Street by Ann Petry: Summary
Chapter 1 The Street opens with the story’s main character, Lutie Johnson, braving a bitter, cold wind as she walks through Harlem in New York City. The wind Lutie faces is personified as a hostile character, mirroring the aggressive attitude of many white Americans toward African Americans during the pre-civil rights era. More generally, the…
Sense and Sensibility: Analysis
AustenBlog declares that ‘‘She’s everywhere.’’ Laurie Brown’s time-travel novel published in 2009 is titled after the question the heroine constantly asks herself: ‘‘What Would Jane Austen Do?’’ More than a decade ago, Austen scholars and readers started their own Republic of Pemberley online (named after Darcy’s estate in Pride and Prejudice) as a clearinghouse of…
Sense and Sensibility: Setting
Jane Austen was born a year before the start of the American Revolution, became a teenager at the beginning of the French Revolution, and grew up during the Napoleonic Wars, the height of the English Empire, and a time of rapid industrial development. Yet global politics do not dramatically affect the narratives of her original…
Sense and Sensibility: Themes
‘‘Sense’’ and ‘‘Sensibility’’ The title of Jane Austen’s novel and the Lee-Thompson film adaptation identifies one key theme of the story: the contrast between good sense and untrustworthy emotions. The moral of Sense and Sensibility is that rational thought, not strong emotions, should guide one’s actions and decisions. Those who get carried away by strong…
Sense and Sensibility: Cast and Characters
Colonel Christopher Brandon A retired army officer and a friend of Sir John Middleton, the kind and honest Colonel Brandon falls in love with Marianne Dashwood and marries her at the end of the film. In the novel, the Colonel is thirty-seven-years old. Alan Rickman, best known for his role as Professor Severus Snape in…
Le Pere Goriot: Analysis
Socially conscious literary critics have made much of Balzac’s realism: his gritty depictions of actual life, in which the sentiments of a social moralist crop up here and there amidst the careful accounts-keeping of a bourgeois citizen (who would rather have been an aristocrat); his troubled portrayal of the decline of the aristocracy and the…
Le Pere Goriot: Themes
The Influence of Environment on Character Honore de Balzac’s portrayal of various social climbing characters in Le Pere Goriot examines how one’s environment shapes one’s character. As A. J. Krailsheimer puts it in the preface to his 1991 translation of the novel, ‘‘What interests Balzac is cause and effect, environment more than heredity, and behavioral…
Le Pere Goriot: Chapter Summaries
Honore de Balzac’s classic novel Le Pere Goriot has been divided in several different ways by its various translators in the nearly two centuries since its original publication in French; the sections here follow the helpful divisions in the Franklin Library’s 1980 edition of an anonymous 1897 translation generally attributed to Jane Minot Sedgwick. Part…
Ordinary People by Judith Guest: Characters
Karen Aldrich Karen is Conrad’s friend from the psychiatric hospital. Conrad tries to reconnect with her after they leave the hospital, but they are no longer close. When Conrad learns she has committed suicide his discovery precipitates a crisis. Exploring his emotions about her death helps Conrad to finally heal the pain from his brother’s…