Ethel Mummery Ethel Mummery is Mr. Mummery’s wife. She is younger than her husband, and her actions make her seem childlike and incapable of taking care of herself. In reality, she is manipulative and deceitful, both in her affair with Welbeck and in poisoning her husband. Mr. Mummery, however, treats her as a delicate, fragile…
Tag: The United Kingdom
Suspicion by Dorothy L. Sayers – Summary
“Suspicion” opens with Mr. Mummery, who, on his way to work, increasingly feels a stomachache. He tries to ignore it and continues to browse the paper, reading about, among other items, a cook who poisoned a nearby family. At the office, he works with his partner, Mr. Brookes. At one point, Mr. Brookes asks if…
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf – Analysis
In naming her story “Kew Gardens,” Woolf chose a specific space to present the melancholy scenes of the characters’ conversation. While the garden might connote an Edenic space in which human beings realize a natural completeness or contentment, Woolf s Kew Gardens transforms, as the story progresses, into a mere screen across which pass the…
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf – Setting
World War I Before World War II, the First World War was simply known as the Great War. As the twentieth century began, Germany, France, England, Russia, and Austria-Hungary intensely guarded their international territorial and economic interests, even to the point of threatening war. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in 1914…
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf – Literary Devices
Point of View and Narration The narrator is an omniscient third person. The narrator sets the scene and is able to delve into each character’s private thoughts. The true narrative insight appears not so much in what is said or illustrated but in the demonstrated inadequacy of the characters’ conversations. The narrator illustrates the garden…
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf – Themes
Loneliness and Alienation Each human character in the story seems lost in his or her own reminiscences. Despite walking with someone in Kew Gardens, the narrator emphasizes ways in which their thoughts are their own. Some of the characters are merely alone with their thoughts, like the first couple who remember by themselves and then…
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf – Characters
Eleanor The wife of Simon and the mother of two children (Caroline and Hubert), Eleanor walks through the garden chatting with her husband who tells her of his failed marriage proposal to Lily years before in Kew Garden. Eleanor remembers herself as a little girl, painting by the lake with five other girls. As Eleanor…
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf – Summary
The story begins by setting the garden scene: a mild, breezy, summer day in July with ”perhaps a hundred stalks” of colorful flowers, petals unfurled to meet the sunlight. The light hits not only the flowers in an “oval-shaped flower-bed” but the brown earth from which they spring and across which a small snail is…
The Erlking by Angela Carter – Analysis
All of the stories in The Bloody Chamber re-imagine the plots and revisit the themes of traditional fairy tales, making explicit their sexual subtexts. For example, Carter offers several different versions of ‘’Little Red Ridinghood” and ”Beauty and the Beast” that focus on innocent young girls’ seduction by animalistic men. Carter observes in her introduction…
The Erlking by Angela Carter – Themes
Nature and Its Meaning The deep woods where the story is set is a lonely, melancholy place, giving in to the creeping coldness of the oncoming winter. It is also a truly wild place; it has ”reverted to its original privacy.” It has a disorienting effect on any human passerby, as indicated by the second-person…