Caroline Kearney faced a heartbreaking dilemma. In 1865 she was newly widowed, thirty-one years old, and the mother of six children. She had hoped her husband would leave his sheep station in Victoria, Australia to her sons. Instead, his will required that the family move to Ireland and live in a house chosen by her brothers-in-law. Pieced together from archives, newspapers, genealogical sites, and legal records, Caroline’s Dilemma sheds new light on colonial family and gender relationships of the nineteenth century and tells the story of how one woman fought to shape her own life within the British Empire.

Lady Caroline Waverly had decided when she was a girl that she would never marry. As a young woman she is mistress of her own estate and wants no man who would mock her intellectual pursuits. Let the charming Lord Nicholas Daventry be ensnared by the bewitching Countess Lavinia Welham. Caro shan’t interfere—if she can resist! Regency Romance by Evelyn Richardson; originally published by Signet

Jane Austen and Vampires is the first book to investigate the literary convergence of Jane Austen and vampires in Austen fanfic after the success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005) and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). It asks how the shifting cultural values of Austen and the vampire have aligned, and what their connection might mean for their respective contemporary legacies. It also makes a case for reading “low brow” Austen fanfic attentively, as a way to gain meaningful insight directly from Austen fans into the tensions and anxieties surrounding contemporary notions of love, sex, femininity, and Austen’s modern currency. Offering close readings of Austen’s vampire-slaying heroines, vampiric retellings of Pride and Prejudice, and the transformation of Austen herself into a vampire, this book reveals Austen-vampire mashups as messy, complex entanglements that creatively and self-reflexively interrogate modern fantasies of vampire romance. By its unique intersection of Jane Austen with the vampire, the Gothic, fan culture and popular romance, Jane Austen and Vampires adds a new chapter to the history of Austen’s reception, for fans, students and scholars alike.

This book explores an online support group for women who are infertile. Offering a close-up view of the women’s identities and emotions as they navigate the “roller-coaster” world of infertility, a range of questions are addressed: How do the women seek support? How do they offer support to one another? How are intimacies produced in the online space? Through narrative analysis of online journals and posts, the authors examine the impact of infertility on women’s perceptions of their bodies, their struggles with medical professionals, on their relationships with family and friends, and the challenges that a diagnosis of infertility presents to couples. Infertility and Intimacy in an Online Community will appeal to social scientists, students from a range of health science disciplines, counsellors and health professionals, and women and men who are dealing with infertility.

This book focuses on the centrality of illness—particularly psychosomatic illness—as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture. It shows how illness shaped the terms through which people perceived relationships between body and mind, self and other, private and public, and how Victorians tried to understand and control their world through a process of physiological and pathological definition.

The Theater of Tony Kushner is a comprehensive portrait of the forty-year long career of dramatist Tony Kushner as playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and public intellectual and political activist. Following an introduction examining the influences of Kushner’s development as an artist, this updated second edition features individual chapters on his major plays, including A Bright Room Called Day, Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne, Angels in America, Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, Homebody/Kabul, Caroline, or Change, and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, along with chapters on Kushner’s adaptations, one-act plays, and screenplays, including his two Academy Award-nominated screenplays, Munich and Lincoln. A book for anyone interested in theater, film, literature, and the ways in which the past informs the present, this second edition of The Theater of Tony Kushner explores how his writings reflect key elements of American society, from politics and economics to race, gender, and spirituality, all with the hope of inspiring America to live up to its ideals.

Vanity, worldly possessions and the pride of life are the substance of Esther’s life. She was “fond of dress” and a yielding mother left this passion unchecked. Consequently she taunted her brother and drove him away from home. Then Esther left home in a fit of anger. “The foundation of all this trouble that had come, not only upon Esther but upon her family, had its root in this—to seem what they were not.”—Esther’s Regret.