Ouida / Classics Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated)

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78656-096-4
Verlag: Delphi Classics Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 26, 16253 Seiten

Reihe: Delphi Series Eight

One of the bestselling late Victorian authors, the English novelist Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, is known for her extravagant melodramatic romances of fashionable life. Her novels were considered controversial, offering a marked contrast to the moralising prose of early Victorian literature. Ouida penned gripping sensational novels, proto-adventure stories and important critiques on contemporary society. This comprehensive eBook presents Ouida's collected works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts appearing in digital print for the first time, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 2)
* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Ouida's life and works
* Concise introductions to the novels and other texts
* 21 novels, with individual contents tables
* Features rare novels appearing for the first time in digital publishing, including 'Pascarel', Moths' and 'Helianthus' and many more
* Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts
* Excellent formatting of the texts
* Rare short stories, often missed out of collections
* Easily locate the short stories you want to read
* Includes Ouida's non-fiction - available in no other collection
* Features a bonus biography
* Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres
* UPDATED with 4 more novels, a short story and a collection of essays
CONTENTS:
The Novels
Held in Bondage (1863)
Under Two Flags (1867)
Folle-Farine (1871)
Pascarel (1873)
Two Little Wooden Shoes (1874)
Signa (1875)
In a Winter City (1876)
Ariadne (1877)
Moths (1880)
A Village Commune (1881)
In Maremma (1882)
Wanda (1883)
Princess Napraxine (1884)
Othmar (1885)
The Tower of Taddeo (1893)
Toxin (1895)
Le Selve (1896)
An Altruist (1897)
The Massarenes (1897)
The Waters of Edera (1900)
Helianthus (1908)
The Shorter Fiction
Cecil Castlemaine's Gage and Other Stories (1867)
Beatrice Boville and Other Stories (1868)
A Dog of Flanders (1872)
Bimbi (1882)
A Rainy June and Other Stories (1885)
A House Party (1887)
A Provence Rose (1893)
Street Dust (1901)
The Short Stories
List of Short Stories in Chronological Order
List of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order
The Non-Fiction
Views and Opinions (1895)
The New Priesthood (1897)
Dogs (1897)
Critical Studies (1900)
The Biography
Brief Biography (1912) by Elizabeth Lee

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ouida

Classics, Delphi

Leseproben

CHAPTER II.
“A Southerly Wind and a Cloudy Sky proclaim it a Hunting Morning.” “CONFOUND it, I can’t cram, and I won’t cram, so there’s an end of it!” sang out a Cantab one fine October morning, flinging Plato’s Republic to the far end of the room, where it knocked down a grind-cup, smashed a punch-bowl, and cracked the glass that glazed the charms of the last pet of the ballet The sun streamed through the oriel windows of my rooms in dear old Trinity. The roaring fire crackled, blazed, and chatted away to a slate-coloured Skye that lay full-length before it. The table was spread with coffee, audit, devils, omelets, hare-pies, and all the other articles of the buttery. The sunshine within, shone on pipes and pictures, tobacco-boxes and little bronzes, books, cards, cigar-cases, statuettes, portraits of Derby winners, and likenesses of fair Anonymas — all in confusion, tumbled pell-mell together among sofas and easy-chairs, rifles, cricket-bats, boxing-gloves, and skates. The sunshine without, shone on the backs, where outriggers and four-oars were pulling up and down the cold classic muddy waters of the Cam, more celebrated, but far less clear and lovely, I must say, than our old dancing, rapid, joyous Kennet. Everything looked essentially jolly, and jolly did I and my two companions feel, smoking before a huge fire, in the easiest of attitudes and couches, a very trifle seedy from a prolonged Wine the night previous. One of them was a handsome young fellow of twenty, a great deal too handsome for the peace of the master’s daughters, and of the fair pâtissières and fleuristes of Petty Cury and King’s Parade; the self-same, save some additional feet of height and some ‘fondly-cherished whiskers, as our little Curly of Frestonhills. The other was a man of six-and-twenty, his figure superbly developed in strength and power, without losing one atom in symmetry, showing how his nerve and muscle would tell pulling up stream, or in a fast fifty minutes across country, or, if occasion turned up, in that “noble art of self-defence,” now growing as popular in England, as in days of yore at Elis. “Cram?” he said, looking up as Curly spoke. “Why should you? What’s the good of it? Youth is made for something warmer than academic routine; and knowledge of the world will stand a man in better stead than the quarrels of commentators, and the dry demonstrations of mathematicians.” “Of course. Not a doubt about it,” said Curly, stretching himself. “I find soda-water and brandy the best guano for the cultivation of my intellect, I can tell you, De Vigne.” “Do you think it will get you a double first?” “Heaven forfend!” cried Curly, with extreme piety. “I’ve no ambition for lawn sleeves, though they do bring with them as neat a little income as any Vessel of Grace, who lives on clover, and forswears the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, can possibly desire.” “You’ll live in clover, my boy, trust you for that,” said De Vigne. “But you won’t pretend that you only take it because you’re ‘called’ to it, and that you would infinitely prefer, if left to yourself, a hovel and dry bread! Don’t cram, Curly; your great saps are like the geese they fatten for foie gras; they overfeed one part of the system till all the rest is weak, diseased, and worthless. But the geese have the best of it, for their livers do make something worth eating, while the reading-man’s brains are rarely productive of anything worth writing.” “Ah!” re-echoed Curly, with an envious sigh of assent. “I wonder whose knowledge is worth the most; my old Coach’s, a living miracle of classic research, who couldn’t, to save his life, tell you who was Premier, translate ‘Comment vous portez-vous?’ or know a Creswick from a Rubens, or yours; who have everything at your fingers’ ends that one can want to hear about, from the last clause in the budget, to the best make in rifles?” De Vigne laughed. “Well, a man can’t tumble about in the world, if he has any brains at all, without learning something; but, my dear fellow, that’s all ‘superficial,’ they’ll tell you; and it is atrociously bad taste to study leading articles instead of Greek unities! Chacun à son goût, you know. That young fellow above your head is a mild, spectacled youth, Arthur says, who gives scientific teas, where you give roistering wines, wins Craven scholarships where you get gated, and falls in love with the fair structure of the Oedipus Tyrannus, where you go mad about the unfortunately more perishable form of that pretty little girl at the cigar-shop over the way! You think him a muff, and he, I dare say, looks on you as an âme damnée, both in the French and English sense of the words. You both fill up niches in your own little world; you needn’t jostle one another. If all horses ran for one Cup only, the turf would soon come to grief. Why ain’t you like me? I go on my own way, and never trouble my head about other people!” “Why am I not like you?” repeated Curly, with a prolonged whistle. “Why isn’t water as good as rum punch, or my bed-maker as pretty as little Rosalie? Don’t I wish I were you, instead of a beggarly younger son, tied by the leg in Granta, bothered with chapel, and all sorts of horrors, and rusticated if I try to see the smallest atom of life. By George! De Vigne, what a jolly time you must have had of it since you left the Chancery!” “Oh, I don’t know,” said De Vigne, looking into the fire with a smile. “I’ve gone the pace, I dare say, as fast as most men, and there are few things I have not tried; but I am not blasé yet, thank Heaven! When other things begin to bore me, I turn back to sport — that never palls; there’s too much excitement in it. Wine one cannot drink too much of — I can’t, at the least — without getting tired of it; women — well, for all the poets write about the joys of constancy, there is no pleasure so great as change there; but with a good speat in the river, or clever dogs among the turnips, or a fine fox along a cramped country, a man need never be dull. The ping of a bullet, the shine of a trout’s back, never lose their pleasure. One can’t say as much for the brightest Rhenish that ever cooled one’s throat, nor the brightest glances that ever lured one into folly; though Heaven forbid that I should ever say a word against either!” “You’d be a very ungrateful fellow if you did,” said I, “seeing that you generally monopolise the very best of both!” He laughed again. “Well, I’ve seen life — I told you young fellows at Frestonhills, I trusted to my sauce piquante; and I must say it has used me very well hitherto, and I dare say always will as long as I keep away from the Jews. While a man has plenty of tin, all the world offers him the choicest dinner; though, when he has overdrawn at Coutts’s, his friends wouldn’t give him dry bread to keep him out of the union! Be able to dine en prince at home, and you’ll be invited out every night of your life; be hungry au troisième, and you must not lick the crumbs from under your sworn allies’ tables, those jolly good fellows, who have surfeited themselves at yours many a time! Oh yes, I enjoy life; a man always can as long as he can pay for it!” With which axiom De Vigne rose from his rocking-chair, laid down his pipe, and stretched himself. “It looks fine out yonder. Our club think of challenging your University Eight for love, good will, and — a gold cup. We never do anything for nothing in England; if we play, we must play for money or ornaments: I should like to do the thing for the sake of the fun, but that isn’t a general British feeling at all. Money is to us, all that glory was to the Romans, and is to the French. Genius is valued by the money it makes; artists are prized by the price of their pictures. If the nation is grateful, once in a hundred years, it votes — a pension; and if we want to have a good-humoured contest, we must wait till there are subscriptions enough to buy a reward to tempt us! Come along, Arthur, let’s have a pull to keep us in practice!” We accordingly had a pull up that time-honoured stream, where Trinity has so often won challenge cups, and luckless King’s got bumped, thanks to its quasi-Etonians’ idleness. Where grave philosophers have watched the setting sun die out of the sky, as the glories of their own youth have died away unvalued, till lost for ever. Where ascetic reading-men have mooned along its banks blind to all the loveliness of the water-lily below, or the clouds above, as they took their constitutional and pondered their prize essay. Where thousands of young fellows have dropped down under its trees, dreaming over Don Juan or the Lotus-eaters; or pulled along, straining muscle and nerve against the Head-Boat; or sauntered beside it in sweet midsummer eves, with some fair face upraised to theirs, long forgotten, out of mind now, but which then had power to make them oblivious of proctors and rustication! We pulled along with hearty good-will, aided by an oar with which, could we have had it to help us...