A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
Medical tag
Grief
Bereavement, mourning, pathological grief.
Works
Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance service of the Italian army, tells the story of his war and his love in plain, retrospective first-person prose. In 1915-16 his unit is quartered in Gorizia, near the Isonzo front.
A Little Princess opens on a foggy London day as seven-year-old Sara Crewe rides in a cab with her adoring father, Captain Ralph Crewe, a young officer who has brought her from India to Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies. Because her father is rich, Sara is given a private sitting room, a French maid, a pony and a doll named Emily whom she half believes can walk and talk when no one is looking.
Across Five Aprils follows the Creighton family of Jasper County in southern Illinois through the Civil War, from April 1861 to April 1865, as seen by the youngest son, Jethro, who is nine when the story opens. The family farm is worked by Matt and Ellen Creighton and their grown and growing children: John, a married son with a family of his own nearby; Bill, thoughtful and gentle, the brother Jethro loves best; Tom, eager for adventure; Jenny, close to Jethro in spirit; and their cousin Eb Carron, raised in the household.
On the morning of 28 January 1986 the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, killing all seven of its crew. Among them was Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire high school teacher chosen as the first Teacher in Space, and because of her, millions of schoolchildren were watching in their classrooms.
Huckleberry Finn tells his own story in the speech of a half-schooled Missouri boy, some forty or fifty years before the book appeared. After the treasure found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas has taken Huck in to civilize him, while her sister Miss Watson drills him in manners and spelling.
Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 'Everyone dies for himself alone') opens in Berlin in 1940, as the postwoman Eva Kluge delivers to Otto and Anna Quangel the news that their only son has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels live in a tenement at 55 Jablonski Strasse with neighbours who represent the range of life under Nazism: the Persickes, a family of brutal Party loyalists; old Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish widow whose flat is looted and who is hounded until she jumps to her death; and retired judge Fromm, who quietly helps where he can.
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
Anne of Green Gables opens in Avonlea, a farming village on Prince Edward Island, where the elderly brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert have arranged to adopt a boy from a Nova Scotia orphan asylum to help on their farm. Through a mistake the child sent is Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old red-haired girl who talks without stopping, renames everything she loves and has survived a hard childhood by imagination.
Apologia Pro Vita Sua is John Henry Newman's defence of his honesty, written in 1864 in reply to the novelist and clergyman Charles Kingsley, who had written in Macmillan's Magazine that truth for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy and that Father Newman taught it need not be. After an exchange of letters and a pamphlet by Kingsley, Newman decided that the only adequate answer was a history of his own mind.
Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, in George Makepeace Towle’s public-domain English translation, follows Phileas Fogg’s Reform Club wager to circle the globe in eighty days with his servant Passepartout, while detective Fix shadows him as a bank-robbery suspect. Steamships, railways, elephants, and storms turn geography into a race; calm precision meets loyal improvisation.
The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie is the steel manufacturer's own story of his life, written mostly in summers at a cottage in the Scottish Highlands after his retirement and left unfinished when the First World War began in August 1914. His widow, Louise Whitfield Carnegie, contributes a preface, and Professor John C. Van Dyke, who arranged the manuscript, adds an editor's note and footnotes; the book appeared in 1920, the year after Carnegie's death.
Beowulf remembers a northern heroic world through three combats that join glory to mortality. Hrothgar's hall Heorot, built as a center of gift-giving and song, becomes a place of terror when Grendel attacks the sleeping retainers.
Black Ships Before Troy is Rosemary Sutcliff's prose retelling of the Trojan War for young readers, in nineteen short chapters. Although subtitled The Story of the Iliad, it begins long before Homer's poem and ends after it.
Bliss and Other Stories, Katherine Mansfield's second collection, gathers fourteen stories written between about 1915 and 1920. It opens with Prelude, her longest work, and moves between New Zealand childhood, Bohemian London, Paris cafés and the hotels of the French Riviera.
Captains Courageous begins in the smoking-room of a transatlantic liner in fog, where fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne, the spoiled only son of an American railroad and shipping millionaire, brags about his pocket money and annoys the grown men. Sick from a strong cigar, he goes out on deck, is pitched overboard by a roll of the ship, and is pulled out of the sea by Manuel, a Portuguese fisherman in a dory from the Gloucester schooner We're Here.
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch is a fictionalized biography of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773–1838), the self-taught Salem mathematician whose New American Practical Navigator became the standard American guide to navigation at sea. It opens in Salem, Massachusetts, during the Revolutionary War, when Nat is a small boy in a seafaring family led by his father, Captain Habakkuk Bowditch.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Charlotte's Web opens at breakfast on the Arable farm, when eight-year-old Fern learns that her father is going out to kill the runt of a new litter of pigs. She protests so fiercely against killing a creature for being small that he gives her the piglet to raise.
City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods.
Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, published at Oxford by the Clarendon Press in four volumes between 1765 and 1769, grew out of the lectures he gave at Oxford from 1753 and as first Vinerian Professor from 1758. It was the first full account of English law written for educated readers rather than for practising lawyers, arranged as a reasoned system instead of a collection of cases.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
Cuchulain of Muirthemne is Lady Gregory's arrangement of the Ulster Cycle, the oldest group of Irish heroic tales, told in the English of the Kiltartan countryside in County Galway, with its Irish turns of phrase such as 'it is what he said'. Working from medieval Irish texts and the editions and translations of nineteenth-century scholars, she joined the separate tales into a single life of the hero Cuchulain, leaving out what she thought her readers would not care for and adding little of her own.
Cyrano de Bergerac is Edmond Rostand's five-act verse play about a seventeenth-century Gascon soldier, poet and swordsman whose enormous nose convinces him that no woman could love him. Act I opens in 1640 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne theatre in Paris.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
The Discourses and the Encheiridion preserve the teaching of Epictetus, a lame former slave who ran a school of Stoic philosophy at Nicopolis in western Greece in the early second century. Epictetus wrote nothing.
Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses is an anthology concept rather than one single-author book: it gathers public religious speech from Black Christian leaders before 1950, using only public-domain sermons, convention addresses, ordination sermons, and printed appeals. Its center is the Black church as pulpit, school, refuge, protest platform, mutual-aid network, and political institution.
This volume joins Robert Frost's first three books of poems, all written about New England farm country and published between 1913 and 1916. A Boy's Will (London, 1913) is a book of short lyrics arranged in three parts, and the library text keeps the original contents page, where each title is followed by an italic gloss in the third person describing what the youth of the book is feeling: in Into My Own he imagines stealing away into dark trees and believes those who follow will find him only more sure of all he thought was true; in Storm Fear he is afraid of his own isolation; in The Tuft of Flowers a mower finds a patch of butterfly weed spared by the man who scythed the field before him and decides that men work together whether they work together or apart; and in Mowing a scythe whispers in the hay while the speaker concludes that fact is the sweetest dream labor knows.
The Essays volume is a selection from the Moralia, the miscellaneous body of some seventy-eight surviving treatises attributed to Plutarch, alongside his famous Lives. Where the Lives teach ethics through the example of great men, the Moralia address readers directly, offering practical moral philosophy in the form of lectures, letters, dialogues and consolations.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
This selection gathers fourteen of Hans Christian Andersen's most loved fairy tales, written between 1835 and 1845, in the English versions revised and partly newly translated by the Scottish scholar W. A. Craigie for Oxford University Press in 1914. In The Tinder-Box a returning soldier fetches a magic tinder-box from a hollow tree for a witch, keeps it, and with the help of three dogs with enormous eyes wins a princess and a kingdom.
Father Goriot opens in 1819 in the Maison Vauquer, a shabby boarding house in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève on the poor edge of the Latin Quarter, which Balzac describes room by room, smell by smell, before introducing its lodgers. Among them are Eugène de Rastignac, a law student from a poor noble family near Angoulême; the hearty, mocking Vautrin, who claims to be a retired merchant; the spinster Mlle.
Fathers and Sons is set in the Russian countryside in the spring and summer of 1859, two years before the emancipation of the serfs. Arkady Kirsanov, a newly graduated student, returns to his father's modest, poorly run estate, Maryino, bringing his friend and mentor Yevgeny Bazarov, a brusque, brilliant medical student of humble origins who calls himself a nihilist: he accepts no principle on authority and values only what is useful, especially natural science.
Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric appeared in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, 'John of silence', the same day as Repetition. Its subject is Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Gargantua and Pantagruel is the collective title of five comic books about a dynasty of giants, written by François Rabelais and published between 1532 and 1564. Pantagruel appeared first, at Lyon in 1532, under the anagram pen-name Alcofribas Nasier; Gargantua, about the father, followed in 1534 or 1535 and is now printed as Book I. The Third Book (1546) and the Fourth Book (complete 1552) bore Rabelais's own name, and a Fifth Book was published in 1564, eleven years after his death; how much of it he wrote is disputed.
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is John Bunyan's account of his own conversion, written in the Bedford county jail and first published in 1666. It is told in 339 numbered paragraphs, opened by a preface addressed to the members of his congregation, whom he calls his children in the faith, and to whom he sends what he calls honey taken from the carcase of a lion.
Great Expectations is the first-person story of Philip Pirrip, called Pip, an orphan brought up by hand by his harsh elder sister and her gentle husband Joe Gargery, the village blacksmith on the Kent marshes. On Christmas Eve, in the churchyard where his parents lie, an escaped convict seizes Pip and makes him bring a file and food; Pip steals both from his sister's house, and the convict is later recaptured struggling with another fugitive.
Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), translated by Abbott as Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, is a short book with a narrow and ambitious aim: to identify and establish the supreme principle of morality. It does not offer a full ethical system, which Kant postponed to the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, but clears the ground by asking what must be true of moral obligation if it is to bind every rational being without exception.
Hamlet opens on the battlements of Elsinore, where sentries and the scholar Horatio see the ghost of the late King Hamlet of Denmark. Prince Hamlet, called home from university at Wittenberg for his father's funeral, is grieving and disgusted that his mother Gertrude has married his uncle Claudius, now king, within two months.
The Heroides (Heroines) is a collection of twenty-one verse letters in elegiac couplets, written as if by women of myth and legend to the men who have left, betrayed or endangered them, together with three pairs of letters exchanged between lovers. Ovid claimed to have invented the form.
Augustine's Homilies on the Gospel of John are pastoral expositions of one of Christianity's most theologically dense texts. Preached to a congregation rather than composed as a detached treatise, they move through John's prologue, signs, discourses, passion narrative, resurrection appearances, and final scenes with Peter and the beloved disciple.
Household Stories is Lucy Crane's English translation of fifty-two tales chosen from the Brothers Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen, first published in London by Macmillan in 1882 with pictures by her brother Walter Crane; the library text follows a later reprint and omits the illustrations. The selection mixes the most famous wonder tales with comic stories, animal fables and short nursery pieces.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
I Will Fight No More Forever is the message of surrender that Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce sent to General Oliver O. Howard and Colonel Nelson A. Miles on 5 October 1877, at the end of the siege at the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana Territory. Since June the non-treaty Nez Perce bands, some 750 people including many women, children, and elderly, had retreated more than a thousand miles from Idaho, through the Bitterroot Mountains, across Yellowstone, and north toward refuge in Canada, fighting a series of engagements with the army along the way.
In Flanders Fields is a fifteen-line poem written in early May 1915 by John McCrae, a Canadian army doctor, during the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium, the battle in which German forces first used chlorine gas on the Western Front. By the traditional account, McCrae wrote it the day after burying his friend and former student Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, killed by a shell on 2 May, in a small cemetery near his dressing station beside the Yser canal, where wild poppies were blooming among the graves.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is Harriet Jacobs's account of her life in slavery and escape, told under the name Linda Brent with the names of people and places changed. Linda grows up in a North Carolina town believing herself free until, at six, her mother dies and she learns she is a slave.
This volume completes the library's surviving plays of Euripides with eleven works in Edward P. Coleridge's prose translation of 1891. Iphigenia in Aulis, produced after the poet's death in 405 BC, opens at night on the shore of Aulis, where the Greek fleet is held back by windless weather.
Island of the Blue Dolphins is narrated by Karana, a girl of about twelve who lives in the village of Ghalas-at on a small island off the California coast in the early nineteenth century; her people call it the Island of the Blue Dolphins. A red-sailed ship brings Captain Orlov, a Russian, and a crew of Aleut hunters, who ask Karana's father, Chief Chowig, to let them take sea otter in exchange for goods.
Jewish Antiquities is Josephus' twenty-book retelling of Jewish history from creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. It is not simply a paraphrase of the Bible, though its first half follows Genesis through the monarchy, exile and restoration.
David McCullough's John Adams is a full narrative biography of the second president of the United States, built largely on the Adams family papers and especially on the letters between John and Abigail Adams. It follows Adams from his boyhood on a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1735, through Harvard College, schoolteaching in Worcester and the law, to his marriage in 1764 to Abigail Smith, whom McCullough presents as his closest adviser and equal partner.
Journey to the West is the great Ming-dynasty comic and religious novel about the monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage from Tang China to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures, guarded by a band of supernatural disciples. The library text is not a full translation.
Jude Fawley is an orphan boy raised by his great-aunt Drusilla in the downland village of Marygreen. When the schoolmaster Richard Phillotson leaves for the university city of Christminster, Jude fixes his hopes on following him.
The Kalevala is the national epic of Finland, compiled by the physician and folklorist Elias Lönnrot from oral songs he and others gathered in Finnish and Russian Karelia. Its fifty runes, or cantos, follow the deeds of the people of Kalevala, chiefly the old singer and sage Väinämöinen, the smith Ilmarinen and the reckless Lemminkäinen, and their long rivalry with Louhi, mistress of the cold northern land of Pohjola.
King Lear begins with a political and familial error: Lear divides Britain according to a public love test, accepts the fluent flattery of Goneril and Regan, rejects Cordelia's plain truth, and banishes Kent for trying to correct him. The abdication leaves Lear with the name of king but without the substance of rule, and the tragedy strips away retinue, shelter, authority, sanity, and finally family.
Kokoro, a word meaning heart, mind or the core of things, is in three parts. In the first, 'Sensei and I', a young university student in Tokyo meets an older man at the seaside resort of Kamakura and is drawn to him, calling him Sensei, 'teacher'.
Le Morte d'Arthur is Thomas Malory's English prose gathering of the Arthurian legend, from the hero's conception to the death of the last knights of the Round Table. Uther Pendragon, with Merlin's help, begets Arthur on Igraine, and the child is raised secretly by Sir Ector.
Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages, is the third of Thomas Bulfinch's books of legend, published in 1863. It retells in English prose the romances that grew up around Charlemagne and his twelve peers, or paladins, chiefly as the Italian Renaissance poets Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto shaped them.
Les Misérables follows the convict Jean Valjean from his release in 1815 to his death in 1833, and through him a whole society of the poor, the lawful and the rebellious in Restoration and July Monarchy France. Valjean has served nineteen years in the galleys at Toulon, five for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's hungry children and the rest for attempts to escape.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's book about the great river in two eras: the steamboat age of his youth and the changed river he revisited in 1882. It opens with three chapters of history and lore, from De Soto and La Salle to the keelboat and raft men, including a long raft episode with the boy Huck Finn borrowed from the novel Twain was then writing.
Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers is Ralph Moody's memoir of the four years, 1906 to 1910, that his family spent on a Colorado ranch, told from the point of view of the boy he was, eight years old when the story begins. His father, Charles, has a persistent cough from his work in a New Hampshire mill, and when a cousin, Phil, who sells gold stock in Denver, promises better prospects, the family leaves East Rochester for a run-down rented ranch near Fort Logan, southwest of Denver.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
Man's Search for Meaning has two parts. The first, Experiences in a Concentration Camp, is not a chronicle of atrocities but a psychiatrist's account of how ordinary prisoners lived, suffered and either kept or lost their inner hold on life.
Mark Antony's funeral oration, which opens Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, is the turning point of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599). Caesar has been stabbed to death in the Capitol by Brutus, Cassius and the other conspirators.
Medea and Other Plays centers on Euripides’ art of making the socially powerless terrifyingly articulate. Medea begins after Jason has abandoned his foreign wife and children to marry the Corinthian princess.
Sherman's Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1875 and revised in 1886, present themselves less as history than as testimony; in the preface to the second edition he says he writes as a witness before the tribunal of history, supplying material for some future historian. The first volume, the text stored in this library, runs from his Ohio boyhood to the Meridian campaign of February 1864.
Usama ibn Munqidh dictated these reminiscences, known in Arabic as the Kitab al-I'tibar (the Book of Learning by Example), when he was nearly ninety lunar years old and living in Damascus under Saladin's patronage. The book is not a continuous autobiography but a sequence of anecdotes, grouped loosely by subject and linked by association, meant to teach that the length of each life is fixed by God and that neither daring nor caution can change it.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
Mother Courage and Her Children follows Anna Fierling, a canteen woman nicknamed Mother Courage, who hauls her covered wagon behind the armies of the Thirty Years' War selling food, drink, boots and belts to soldiers. The play covers twelve years, from 1624 to 1636, in twelve scenes, each introduced by a written caption that tells the audience in advance what will happen.
Mrs. Dalloway follows a single day in the middle of June 1923 in London, from a bright morning to the small hours of a party. Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-one, wife of the Conservative Member of Parliament Richard Dalloway, walks from Westminster up to Bond Street to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
Number the Stars is set in Copenhagen and on the north coast of Zealand in September and October 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark. Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen race each other home from school and are stopped on the street by two German soldiers; Annemarie's little sister Kirsti, five, chatters at them fearlessly.
O Captain! My Captain!
Old Yeller is narrated by Travis Coates, who looks back on the year he was fourteen, in the late 1860s, on his family's homestead near the settlement of Salt Licks in the Texas Hill Country. After the Civil War cattle money is scarce, so Papa joins the other men of the settlement on a long drive to sell cattle in Kansas, leaving Travis as the man of the place with Mama and his little brother, Arliss.
On Fairy-Stories is Tolkien's defense of fairy-story as a serious form of imaginative art. He begins by rejecting narrow definitions that identify fairy tales with children, small supernatural beings, dreams, or mere folklore collection.
This small volume presents Montaigne's celebrated essay on friendship together with other essays from the Essais in M. A. Screech's translation. The title essay, 'Of Friendship' (Book I, Chapter 28 in modern numbering), was written as a memorial to Étienne de La Boétie, the young magistrate and humanist whom Montaigne met in Bordeaux around 1558 and who died in 1563.
Othello is the tragedy of a Moorish general in the service of Venice who is brought, step by step, to murder the wife who loves him. The play opens at night in a Venetian street, where the ensign Iago, furious that Othello has promoted the Florentine Michael Cassio over him, rouses the senator Brabantio with crude news that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with the Moor.
Our Town presents Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, through three acts named Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death and Eternity. The Stage Manager introduces streets, families, dates, statistics, church steeples, milk deliveries, schoolbooks, and weather with almost no scenery, making the ordinary visible by stripping theater to gesture, voice, and memory.
Pericles' Funeral Oration is the speech that the Athenian statesman Pericles delivered in the winter of 431/430 BC at the public burial of the citizens who had died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta. It survives only in the History of Thucydides, who heard Pericles speak and who says of the speeches in his work that he kept as close as he could to the general sense of what was actually said.
Persuasion is Austen's last completed novel, a story of second chances. Anne Elliot is the overlooked middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain and extravagant baronet of Kellynch Hall in Somerset.
Gerard Manley Hopkins's Poems, published after his death in 1918, bring together a Jesuit priest's experiments in sound, perception, praise, and spiritual desolation. Hopkins's key ideas of inscape and instress name the particular form of a created thing and the energy by which that form is apprehended.
This volume gathers the three books that first introduced Emily Dickinson's poetry to the public, all published in Boston in the decade after her death in 1886. Poems (1890) was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, a young Amherst neighbor, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man of letters with whom Dickinson had corresponded since 1862; Poems: Second Series followed in 1891 under the same two editors, and Poems: Third Series in 1896, edited by Todd alone.
Psalm 23 is a six-verse song of trust, headed in the Hebrew Psalter as a psalm of David and placed in the first book of Psalms, between the anguished cry of Psalm 22 and the processional hymn of Psalm 24. Its speaker never asks for anything.
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) follows a restless young Englishman who ignores his father’s counsel, goes to sea, and after storms and slavery is cast alone on an island where industry, improvisation, and providence remake his life. The novel invented a lasting modern myth of solitude: journal-keeping, goat pens, canoe failures, fear of footprints, and the arrival of Friday.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of two young lovers from feuding families in Verona, compressed by Shakespeare into about four days. A sonnet Prologue announces that a pair of star-crossed lovers will end their parents' strife by their deaths.
Sarah, Plain and Tall is a short chapter book narrated by Anna Witting, who lives on a prairie farm in the late nineteenth century with her father, Jacob, and her little brother, Caleb. Their mother died the day after Caleb was born, and since then Papa has stopped singing.
Calvin's Selected Sermons present the Reformation as disciplined exposition rather than only protest. Preaching in Geneva, Calvin moved sequentially through biblical books, applying Scripture to doctrine, worship, civic life, household conduct, suffering, and church reform.
Spurgeon's Selected Sermons show Victorian evangelical preaching at industrial scale. Week by week, his sermons moved from pulpit to print, reaching readers far beyond the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
Moody's Selected Sermons represent revival preaching after the Civil War, in the age of railroads, urbanization, mass meetings, gospel hymnody, and organized evangelistic campaigns. Moody's style is famously plain.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
Sixty Stories is Donald Barthelme's own selection of his short fiction from roughly two decades, drawn from collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, City Life, Sadness, Amateurs and Great Days, together with some previously uncollected pieces. The stories are short, often only a few pages, and are among the defining works of American postmodern fiction.
Surprised by Joy is C. S. Lewis's account of his life from early childhood to his acceptance of Christianity in 1931. Lewis says in his preface that the book is not a full autobiography but the story of his conversion, and that it follows one thread: his experience of what he calls Joy, a sudden, piercing longing for something unnamed that is itself more desirable than any ordinary satisfaction.
Tanglewood Tales is Nathaniel Hawthorne's second book of Greek myths retold for children, a sequel to A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. In a short introduction called The Wayside, Hawthorne pretends that the stories were written by his young friend Eustace Bright, a Williams College student who had told the first set to a group of children at Tanglewood in the Berkshires; Eustace visits Hawthorne's snowy Concord hillside with six new stories, and Hawthorne agrees to act as editor.
Testament of Youth is Vera Brittain's memoir of the years 1900 to 1925, centred on the First World War, written to show what the war meant to a generation of women. It begins with her provincial girlhood in Buxton, where she chafes against the expectations placed on a middle-class daughter, educates herself, and fights to be allowed to sit the entrance examination for Oxford.
The Aeneid tells how Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, travels from ruined Troy to Italy to found the lineage that will become Rome. The poem opens with storm and displacement: Juno hates the Trojans, Aeolus releases winds, and Aeneas reaches Carthage.
The Age of Alexander is a collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives covering the Greek world in the fourth and early third centuries BCE, from the decline of Sparta and Thebes through the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander to the struggles of his successors. Removed from their original Roman pairings, they read as a sequence of Greek history told through character.
The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, is Thomas Bulfinch's prose retelling of Greek and Roman mythology, with shorter chapters on Egyptian, Eastern, Norse and Celtic belief, first published in Boston in 1855. Bulfinch, a bank clerk with a Harvard classical education, wrote it so that ordinary readers could understand the mythological allusions in English poetry and speech.
This volume contains Tacitus' two earliest works, both written in 98 CE, soon after the assassination of the emperor Domitian. The Agricola is a biography and eulogy of the author's father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who died in 93.
The Alexiad is the life and reign of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (ruled 1081–1118), written by his daughter Anna in fifteen books. In her preface Anna introduces herself as born in the purple and trained in Aristotle and Plato, explains that her husband, the Caesar Nikephoros Bryennios, had begun a history of her father but died of an illness brought home from campaign, and promises to praise or blame as the facts require.
The Bacchae and Other Plays presents Euripides at his most dangerous: gods are real, but that does not make them gentle. The Bacchae begins when Dionysus arrives at Thebes in disguise to punish the royal house for denying his divinity and slandering his mother Semele.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
The Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.
The Bronze Bow is set in Galilee in the years of Jesus' public ministry, under Roman rule. Its hero, Daniel bar Jamin, is eighteen and has lived for five years with an outlaw band in the hills above his village of Ketzah, near Capernaum.
The Brothers Karamazov centers on the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a sensual, neglectful father whose sons embody conflicting responses to desire, faith, reason, and guilt. Dmitri is passionate, impulsive, indebted, and publicly at war with his father over inheritance and Grushenka.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
The Consolation of Philosophy is a prison dialogue between the condemned Boethius and Lady Philosophy, who appears at his bedside when he is sick with grief and self-pity. The work alternates prose and metre.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the great poem of ancient Mesopotamia, known in its fullest form from the standard Babylonian version on clay tablets, many of them from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The library holds no text of it: the public-domain English versions, by Stephen Langdon (1917), Morris Jastrow and Albert T. Clay (1920) and R. Campbell Thompson (1928), are fragmentary scholarly editions of a poem still being recovered, so this record describes the epic without quoting it.
Darwin's Expression of the Emotions is one of the founding works of comparative psychology. It asks how humans and animals express fear, anger, joy, grief, shame, disgust, attention, and other states through face, posture, voice, tears, hair, muscles, and involuntary action.
Jonas is eleven and lives with his father, a Nurturer who cares for newborns, his mother, who holds an important post in the Department of Justice, and his younger sister Lily in a tidy, enclosed Community where nearly everything is decided for its citizens. Families are assigned, each with one son and one daughter; babies are born to Birthmothers and given out at the yearly December Ceremony; children receive bicycles at Nine and jobs at Twelve; precise language is enforced with public apologies; everyone takes a daily pill once the Stirrings of adolescent desire begin; and those who break the rules three times, the old, and newborns who fail to thrive are "released" to a vague Elsewhere.
The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles is Padraic Colum's retelling for young readers of the voyage of the Argo, with many other Greek myths woven into it as stories told by the heroes on the way. It was published in New York by Macmillan in 1921, with illustrations by Willy Pogány, and was named a Newbery Honor book in 1922.
The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner and war veteran who comes East in the spring of 1922 to learn the bond business and rents a small house in West Egg, on Long Island, beside the vast mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Across the bay in fashionable East Egg live Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, a rich former Yale football player, along with Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, a champion golfer.
The Hiding Place is Corrie ten Boom's memoir, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, of her family's life in Haarlem, their work hiding Jews during the German occupation of the Netherlands, and her imprisonment with her sister Betsie in Nazi prisons and camps. It opens in January 1937 with the hundredth anniversary of the watch shop in the narrow old house called the Beje, where Corrie, then in her forties and unmarried, lives with her father Casper and her older sister Betsie.
The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three anonymous Greek poems addressed to the gods, composed in the same dactylic hexameter and formulaic language as the Iliad and Odyssey. Ancient audiences treated many of them as Homer's own; most scholars now see them as the work of different singers over a long period, with the four great narrative hymns usually dated to the archaic age and some short pieces much later.
The Iliad tells of a few weeks in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, and its subject, announced in the first line, is the wrath of Achilles. A plague sent by Apollo ravages the Greek camp because Agamemnon, commander of the Achaeans, has refused to return the captive daughter of Apollo's priest Chryses.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Jungle Book is a collection of seven animal stories, each followed by a song or poem. The first three tell of Mowgli, a man's cub raised by wolves in the Seeonee hills of central India.
The Last Battle tells of the end of Narnia, some two hundred years after the reign of Caspian X. Beside Caldron Pool, under the great waterfall in the far west, lives Shift, a clever, ugly old Ape, with his simple friend Puzzle the Donkey, whom he bullies. When a lion's skin washes down the falls, Shift sews it into a coat for Puzzle and, showing him by firelight in a stable on a hill, announces to the Narnians that Aslan has returned.
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is set in the wilderness of northern New York during the French and Indian War. Colonel Munro, the Scottish commander of Fort William Henry on Lake George, which the scout calls the Horican, is threatened by the French general Montcalm and his Native allies.
The Little Prince is told by a pilot who, as a boy of six, drew a boa constrictor digesting an elephant; every grown-up who saw Drawing Number One took it for a hat, and he gave up art for flying. Years later his engine fails in the Sahara, a thousand miles from anyone, with water for about a week.
The Mabinogion is the name given to eleven medieval Welsh prose tales, preserved mainly in the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, together with the Tale of Taliesin, which Lady Charlotte Guest added from a later source. The library text is Guest's translation in the one-volume form, with her introduction and a few of her notes; it follows her order, opening with the three Arthurian romances.
The Magician's Nephew is the story of how Narnia began and how a wardrobe came to lead into it. In London around 1900, Digory Kirke has been sent to live with his Uncle Andrew and Aunt Letty because his father is in India and his mother is gravely ill.
The Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883) gathers the Sherwood outlaw tales into one continuous prose romance for young readers: archery contests, Lincoln green fellowship, clever rescues, and courtesy toward the poor in the days of King Henry. Pyle’s Robin is bold and playful rather than grim; Little John, Friar Tuck, and the merry men turn skill into loyalty.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T. S. Eliot, in his 1921 review of Herbert Grierson's earlier anthology, praised them for a unified sensibility in which thought and feeling were fused.
The Murder on the Links is Agatha Christie's second Hercule Poirot novel, narrated like the first by Captain Arthur Hastings. Returning from Paris on the Calais boat-train, Hastings meets a pert young actress with black curls who calls herself Cinderella.
Mary Rowlandson's narrative tells of the eleven weeks and five days she spent as a captive during King Philip's War, the conflict of 1675-1676 between the New England colonies and an alliance of Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc and other Native peoples led in part by the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, whom the English called King Philip. It opens on 10 February 1675, by the Old Style calendar then used in English New England (20 February 1676 in modern reckoning), when a large war party attacks Lancaster, Massachusetts.
The New York Trilogy gathers three linked short novels: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Each begins from the materials of detective fiction and then dissolves the detective plot into questions of identity, authorship, language and mental disintegration.
The Nibelungenlied is a medieval German epic of courtship, deception, insult and catastrophic revenge. Its first half centers on Siegfried, prince of Xanten, who comes to Worms hoping to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian kings Gunther, Gernot and Giselher.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
The Oresteia follows the House of Atreus from inherited blood guilt to the foundation of civic justice. Agamemnon opens at Argos, where a watchman sees the beacon announcing Troy’s fall.
The Pearl is a short novella in six chapters, framed as a folk tale retold in the Gulf town of La Paz, on the coast of Baja California. Kino, a poor pearl diver, lives in a brush house by the shore with his wife, Juana, and their infant son, Coyotito.
John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) is the dream-allegory of Christian fleeing the City of Destruction with a burden on his back, seeking the Celestial City through Slough, Wicket Gate, Hill Difficulty, Vanity Fair, and Doubting Castle. Written by a tinker-preacher in prison, it became the English-speaking world’s most widely read religious narrative after Scripture.
The Plague is a chronicle of an epidemic of bubonic and then pneumonic plague in Oran, a commercial port on the Algerian coast, in an unspecified year of the 1940s. The narrator, who reveals himself only at the end as the physician Bernard Rieux, writes as an impartial witness, drawing also on the notebooks of his friend Jean Tarrou.
The Poetic Edda is the collection of anonymous Old Norse poems about the gods and heroes of the North, preserved chiefly in the Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Regius, written about 1270. The library text is the complete translation by Henry Adams Bellows, published in 1923 by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which renders thirty-five poems in alliterative verse and adds a general introduction, an introductory note to each poem and extensive notes.
The Prose Edda is a handbook of Norse myth and of the art of skaldic poetry, written in Iceland around 1220 by the chieftain and historian Snorri Sturluson. It was meant to teach young poets the old stories and the poetic names (kennings) that the court verse of Scandinavia depended on, at a time when Iceland had been Christian for more than two centuries.
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published by Duckworth in London in late 1914, is D. H. Lawrence's first collection of short fiction: twelve stories, most of them revised from magazine versions written between about 1907 and 1914. Two are set among German soldiers, the rest in the colliery villages and farms of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up.
The Quiet American is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist in French-controlled Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The novel begins after the death of Alden Pyle, a young American official whose innocence, confidence and political theories have made him dangerous.
The Ramayana, the story of Rama's journey, is one of the two great Sanskrit epics of India, attributed to the sage Valmiki and composed in the sloka couplet. It opens with a frame: Valmiki asks the sage Narada whether any man on earth is perfectly virtuous, hears the life of Rama, and, moved to pity when a fowler shoots one of a pair of curlews, utters the first sloka; the god Brahma then bids him tell the whole tale.
The Raven is a narrative poem of eighteen six-line stanzas in which a grieving student, alone at midnight in December, is visited by a talking bird that can say only one word. It appeared in the New York Evening Mirror on 29 January 1845, ahead of its printing in The American Review, and made Poe famous almost overnight.
The Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
The Sign of the Beaver takes place in the Maine woods in 1768. Matt Hallowell, twelve years old and about to turn thirteen, has helped his father clear land and build a log cabin on a new claim.
The Silver Chair begins behind the gym at Experiment House, a muddled modern boarding school where bullies rule. Jill Pole is crying there when Eustace Scrubb, much changed since his voyage on the Dawn Treader, tells her about Narnia.
The Sketch Book is a miscellany of essays, travel sketches and tales presented as the notebook of Geoffrey Crayon, a genial American bachelor who crosses the Atlantic to look at the England he has known from books. Crayon opens by explaining that he wanders to see the shifting scenes of life, then describes the voyage itself, a visit to the Liverpool historian William Roscoe, and a portrait of a wife who sustains her ruined husband.
The Song of Hiawatha is a book-length poem in twenty-two cantos with an Introduction, retelling legends of the Ojibway and neighbouring peoples around a single hero on the south shore of Lake Superior, which the poem calls Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water. The Introduction presents the songs as gathered by the singer Nawadaha from the forest, the birds and the rivers, and addresses readers who believe every human heart is human.
The Souls of Black Folk is a book of fourteen chapters framed by a short Forethought and Afterthought, in which W. E. B. Du Bois sets out to show readers what it meant to be Black in the United States at the opening of the twentieth century. He announces his subject at once: the great problem of the new century is the color line.
The Story of a Soul is the autobiography of Thérèse Martin, a young Carmelite nun of Lisieux in Normandy, written at the request of her superiors in the last years of her short life and published a year after her death. In the library text, Thomas N. Taylor's 1912 translation, it is arranged in eleven chapters addressed to her sister Pauline, by then Mother Agnes of Jesus, and framed by a prologue on her parents and birth and an epilogue on her final illness.
The Story of the Volsungs is a thirteenth-century Icelandic prose saga that tells, from beginning to end, the legend of the Volsung kindred, the dragon-slayer Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs. The library text is the translation by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, first published in 1870, in the 1888 edition, with an introduction, the translators' preface, notes, and an appendix of Morris and Magnússon's versions of related Eddic lays, from the Second Lay of Helgi Hundings-bane to the Lament of Oddrun.
The Stranger is a short novel in two parts narrated by Meursault, a young shipping clerk in Algiers in French Algeria, who reports what he sees and feels in plain, flat sentences and seldom explains himself. Part One, in six chapters, covers about eighteen days.
The Sword in the Stone is T. H. White's comic and affectionate account of the boyhood of King Arthur, set in a merry, anachronistic Middle Ages. Arthur, called the Wart, is an orphan of unknown birth raised by the kindly Sir Ector at the Castle of the Forest Sauvage alongside Ector's son Kay, an older, proud and often unhappy boy who will one day be a knight while the Wart expects to be his squire.
The Theban Plays collects Sophocles’ tragedies about Oedipus and his children: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. They were not written as a trilogy, but together they form the most influential family disaster in Western drama.
This volume gathers three Euripides plays about what the Trojan War left behind: The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris in Gilbert Murray's rhyming verse, and Hecuba in Michael Wodhull's blank verse of 1782. The Trojan Women opens on the smoking ruins of Troy.
The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real (1922), is Margery Williamss tender story of a stuffed rabbit who longs to become Real. At first he is unused in the nursery; the wise Skin Horse explains that Real is not how you are made but what happens when a child loves you for a long time.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
Hesiod's two complete poems are the oldest Greek attempts to explain, in verse, where the gods came from and how a man ought to live under them. Both are in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, and both begin with the Muses.
John Adams's Thoughts on Government and selected letters present a founder preoccupied with constitutional balance, civic virtue, law, ambition, and the fragility of republics. Thoughts on Government, written in 1776, argues that new American states should avoid simple unicameral democracy and instead build mixed, balanced institutions with separated powers and independent courts.
Through Gates of Splendor is Elisabeth Elliot's account of five young American missionaries who were killed in January 1956 while trying to make friendly contact with the Waorani, an isolated people of the Ecuadorian rainforest then known to outsiders as the Aucas. Elliot, the widow of one of the men, tells the story largely through the men's own letters, diaries and the recollections of their wives.
Till We Have Faces, subtitled A Myth Retold, rewrites the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius's Golden Ass, told by one of Psyche's elder sisters. Orual, now an old queen of Glome, a small barbarian kingdom on the edge of the Greek world, writes her book as a formal accusation against the gods.
To the Lighthouse, published by the Hogarth Press in May 1927, follows the Ramsay family and their guests at a holiday house on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides, across one evening before the First World War and one morning ten years later. Virginia Woolf tells it almost entirely through the passing thoughts of her characters, so that small events, a remark about the weather, a dinner, a brushstroke, carry the weight of a lifetime.
Travels with My Aunt begins with retired bank manager Henry Pulling attending his mother's funeral. There he meets his formidable Aunt Augusta, who disrupts his suburban routine and suggests that his family history is less settled than he believed.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
In 1866 ships in several oceans report a huge, swift, glowing creature, and some are holed by it. Pierre Aronnax, a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris who happens to be in New York, publishes the opinion that it is a gigantic narwhal and is invited to join the American frigate Abraham Lincoln, under Commander Farragut, which sails to hunt it.
Ulysses is a seventy-line dramatic monologue in blank verse that Tennyson wrote in October 1833, within weeks of learning that his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, had died suddenly in Vienna. He published it in his two-volume Poems of 1842.
Uncle Tom's Cabin follows two lines of story that begin on the Kentucky farm of Arthur Shelby, a kindly but indebted master who agrees to sell two slaves to the trader Haley: Uncle Tom, his faithful and devout manager, and Harry, the small son of Eliza, Mrs. Shelby's maid. Overhearing the bargain, Eliza flees north with Harry that night, and with the slave-catchers close behind she crosses the Ohio River by leaping from one floating cake of ice to another.
War and Peace follows several Russian noble families from 1805 to 1820, through the wars against Napoleon and the French invasion of 1812. It opens at a St. Petersburg soirée given by Anna Pávlovna Schérer in July 1805, where talk of Bonaparte mixes with gossip about inheritances.
Washington Square is a compact novel about an heiress, a suitor and a father whose intelligence becomes a weapon. Catherine Sloper is the plain, shy and dutiful daughter of Dr. Austin Sloper, a wealthy New York physician still grieving his brilliant dead wife and disappointed that Catherine lacks her mother's beauty and charm.
Where the Red Fern Grows is narrated by Billy Colman, now a grown man in a town far from the Ozarks. Walking home from work one evening, he rescues an old redbone hound from a pack of town dogs, feeds it and lets it go home, and the encounter brings back the story of his boyhood.
Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) opens in the Hundred Acre Wood, where a Bear of Very Little Brain lives under the name of Sanders and Christopher Robin asks for stories about him. A. A. Milne builds the book from short chapters of honey, balloons, floods, Heffalumps, Expositions to the North Pole, and birthday muddles.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr. Lockwood, a tenant at Thrushcross Grange, becomes curious about his landlord Heathcliff and the strange household at Wuthering Heights.
Passages
- A Christmas Carol, Stave IV
An unattended corpse stripped of its bed-curtains and shirt; the Cratchits mourn Tiny Tim.
- A Farewell to Arms, Book V, Chapter XLI
Catherine's long labour with gas, the doctor's advice to perform a Caesarean, the stillborn son, the repeated haemorrhages and her death.
- A Little Princess, Chapter 7, The Diamond Mines Again
Mr. Barrow tells Miss Minchin that Captain Crewe died of jungle fever combined with the strain of his business losses.
- Across Five Aprils, 1862
The family learns that Tom has been killed at Shiloh.
- Address to the Nation on the Challenger Disaster, Paragraph 4
Reagan's words to the schoolchildren who watched the launch, explaining that painful things happen as part of exploration.
- Address to the Nation on the Challenger Disaster, Paragraph 3
The address to the families, acknowledging that others cannot bear the full impact of their loss.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter XVII
Huck describes the dead Emmeline Grangerford's mourning pictures and obituary poems.
- Alone in Berlin, Part I, opening
Anna's collapse on hearing of her son's death and Otto's silent, hardening grief.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XXXIII, §7–16
Associations producing antipathies (surfeit of honey), fear of the dark, rumination on injury, aversion to places of illness, unending grief, aversion to a surgeon who cured madness, and context-bound dancing.
- Anne of Green Gables, Chapter XXXVII
Matthew, who has had heart trouble, collapses and dies after reading of the Abbey Bank's failure.
- Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, Chapter XV
His typhoid fever of 1886 and the deaths of his mother and brother within a few days while he was ill.
- Beowulf, The dragon and the barrow
Beowulf gives this tag concrete force through the medical interest lies in battle wounds, grief, aging kingship, and the social care owed to bodies that have been broken in public violence
- Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad, Chapters 11-12
Achilles's grief for Patroclus, the mourning in the camp and the funeral pyre.
- Bliss and Other Stories, Revelations
Monica Tyrell's morning crisis of nerves, her flight to the hairdresser, and the news of the death of George's little daughter.
- Captains Courageous, Chapter III
Salters tells Harvey that Penn was a Moravian preacher who lost his family in the Johnstown flood and his memory with them.
- Captains Courageous, Chapter X
Gloucester's memorial service reads the names of the fishermen lost that year.
- Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, Later chapters (between voyages)
News reaches Nat that Elizabeth Boardman has died of consumption.
- Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, Early chapters
Deaths in the Bowditch household during Nat's boyhood and indenture.
- Ceremony, Flashbacks to the Philippines
The Bataan march, Rocky's wounds and death, and the execution of Japanese prisoners.
- Charlotte's Web, Chapter XXI
Charlotte tells Wilbur she will not return to the barn and dies alone at the fairground after the crowds leave.
- Charlotte's Web, Chapter XXII
Wilbur guards the egg sac through the winter and welcomes Charlotte's daughters in spring, keeping her memory.
- City of God, Book 19
Earthly peace is real but fragile, framed against the final peace of God’s city.
- Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book I, ch. 8
Non compos mentis caused by disease, grief or accident; lucid intervals; persons under frenzies or losing intellect by disease; the crown as trustee for their recovery.
- Confessions, Book IV.4–9
Grief at the death of a friend: weeping, hatred of familiar places, weariness of life and fear of death.
- Confessions, Book IX.10–13
Monica's fever and death at Ostia and Augustine's struggle to restrain his tears.
- Cuchulain of Muirthemne, Death of Cuchulain (Emer's lament)
Emer asks Conall to make the grave wide, lies down beside Cuchulain and dies of grief; the two are buried under one stone.
- Cyrano de Bergerac, Act 4, final scenes
Christian is brought back mortally wounded and dies in Roxane's arms as the Spanish attack.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 9
David learns of his mother's death and that of her newborn baby.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 48–53
Dora's illness and death, and David's grief.
- Discourses (selection) and Encheiridion, Encheiridion, chs. IX and XI
Disease and lameness as impediments to the body but not the will; the discipline of saying of the dead that they have been restored.
- Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses, Abolition and emancipation sermons
Preachers interpret slavery and racial violence as wounds requiring public repentance, endurance, and liberation.
- Early Poems: A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, North of Boston, Home Burial
A mother's grief for her firstborn turns against her husband, who dug the grave himself; the poem stages two incompatible ways of mourning.
- Essays, Consolation to his Wife
Plutarch's letter on the death of their two-year-old daughter, urging moderated mourning and describing his wife's composure.
- Essays, Book I, Ch. XXVII, 'Of Friendship'
Memorial to La Boétie, whose death leaves Montaigne describing himself as only half a person.
- Fairy Tales (Selection), The Little Match Girl
A barefoot, hungry child dies of cold in a corner on New Year's Eve, seeing visions of a warm stove, a roast goose, a Christmas tree and her dead grandmother.
- Father Goriot (Le Père Goriot), Account of Goriot's history
The narrator traces how Goriot's fatherhood, after his wife's death, developed almost into a mania.
- Father Goriot (Le Père Goriot), Goriot's death
Delirium, calls for the absent daughters, Anastasie's arrival when he can no longer hear, and the death announced by Bianchon.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 28
Bazarov's old parents visit his grave.
- Fear and Trembling, Preamble from the Heart
The lad who renounces the princess and transforms lost love into eternal remembrance, a model of resignation set beside grief.
- Frankenstein, Vol. II, Ch. I (1818) / Ch. 9 (1831)
After Justine's execution, Victor's despondency, sleeplessness and thoughts of drowning himself in the lake.
- Frankenstein, Vol. III, Ch. VII (1818) / Ch. 23–24 (1831)
Alphonse Frankenstein dies of grief; Victor is confined for months as a madman before beginning his pursuit.
- Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book II, Chapters II-III
Badebec dies in giving birth to Pantagruel, and Gargantua is torn between grief for his wife and joy at his son.
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, §§327-328
The grief of separation from his wife and children in prison and his fear for his blind daughter.
- Great Expectations, Chapter VIII
Satis House and Miss Havisham's stopped clocks and withered bridal dress.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, First Section (examples of acting from duty)
The person who preserves life without loving it after hopeless sorrow, and the philanthropist whose own grief has extinguished sympathy.
- Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2
Hamlet's first soliloquy wishes his flesh would melt and regrets the divine law against self-slaughter.
- Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5
Ophelia's madness after her father's death: songs, flowers and broken speech.
- Heroides, Letter VII (Dido to Aeneas)
Dido, sleepless and consumed by love, prepares the pyre and writes her own epitaph.
- Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homilies on Lazarus
Death and resurrection supply Augustine with a pastoral language for grief, sin, and renewed life.
- Household Stories (Grimm's Fairy Tales), Aschenputtel, opening
The dying mother blesses her daughter, who weeps daily at the grave where the hazel tree grows.
- Humboldt's Gift, Middle sections
Humboldt's death alone in a Times Square hotel, and Charlie's memory of avoiding him shortly before.
- Humboldt's Gift, Final section
Reburial of Humboldt and his mother.
- I Will Fight No More Forever, Harper's Weekly text, sentence 14
Joseph speaks of his own exhaustion and sorrow as he decides to surrender.
- In Flanders Fields, Lines 6-9
The dead recall their lives and their sudden end, a few days after living and loving.
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chapter XXVIII, Aunt Nancy
Her aunt's broken health from night nursing on the floor of the entry, and the deaths of her infants.
- Iphigenia in Aulis and Other Plays, Heracles, final scene
Heracles wakes bound to a pillar, learns what he has done, contemplates suicide, and is persuaded by Theseus to live.
- Iphigenia in Aulis and Other Plays, The Suppliants, Evadne scene
Evadne throws herself onto the pyre of Capaneus before her father Iphis.
- Island of the Blue Dolphins, Chapter 7-8
Ramo is killed by the wild dogs and Karana is left alone with her grief.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 15, Herodian family violence
Herod's household murders and suspicions are narrated as political pathology, a non-clinical portrait of fear, rage and moral disorder.
- John Adams, Part III
Charles Adams's decline and death in 1800 during his father's last months as president.
- John Adams, Part III
Nabby's mastectomy in 1811, her death in 1813, and Abigail's death in 1818.
- Journey to the West (A Mission to Heaven), Chapter LXIX
Sun diagnoses a king's illness at a distance by a string attached to his wrist; the illness proves to be grief for an abducted wife.
- Jude the Obscure, Part Sixth, Ch. II
The deaths of the three children at the Christminster lodgings, the boy's note, and the Doctor's theory of children who wish not to live.
- Jude the Obscure, Part Sixth, Ch. II–IV
The premature birth and death of Sue's baby, her conviction of divine judgment, and her penitential return to Phillotson.
- Kalevala, Runes IV and XXXV-XXXVI
Aino drowns herself and her mother laments; Kullervo's sister drowns herself and Kullervo falls on his sword.
- King Lear, Recognition and loss
King Lear gives this tag concrete force through lear is central for psychiatry and aging: cognitive vulnerability, rage, delirium, homelessness, trauma, blindness, caregiving, and unbearable grief
- Kokoro, Part One
Sensei's monthly visits to K's grave and his gloomy reflections on human nature.
- Kokoro, Part Three
K's suicide in his room and Sensei's discovery of the body and the note.
- Le Morte d'Arthur, Book IX, Ch. XXXVI
Malory's reflection on sickness as the greatest pain a prisoner may have, as Tristram nearly kills himself in despair.
- Legends of Charlemagne, The Battle of Roncesvalles
Orlando, spent with toil and fever, rides to a fountain where his dying horse kneels and falls; he strikes the rock with Durindana, receives Turpin's absolution and dies, and Charlemagne grieves over the field of slain.
- Les Misérables, Volume V, Book 9, Chapter II
The doctor's judgment that Valjean is dying of the loss of someone dear to him.
- Letters from a Stoic, Letter 63
Grief for a friend is acknowledged but disciplined within Stoic limits.
- Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 20
Henry Clemens's last six days under Dr. Peyton's care, ending with his wandering mind and fingers picking at the coverlet.
- Little Britches, Final chapter
Father is thrown from Babe, his cough returns, a doctor diagnoses pneumonia and orders bed rest, and he dies; the family mourns.
- Little Women, Part Two, Ch. 36 and 40
Beth's slow decline at the seaside and at home; her death nursed by Jo.
- Little Women, Part Two, Ch. 42
Jo's grief after Beth's death and her turn to writing from life.
- Man's Search for Meaning, Part One, third phase
Depersonalization, the inability to feel pleasure after liberation, and bitterness and disillusionment on finding loved ones dead.
- Man's Search for Meaning, Part Two
Clinical cases of paradoxical intention and dereflection, and the elderly physician whose grief for his wife is reframed as a sacrifice that spared her.
- Mark Antony's Funeral Oration ("Friends, Romans, countrymen"), Act 3, Scene 2 (close of the first speech)
Antony breaks off, saying his heart is in the coffin with Caesar, a display of grief that moves the citizens.
- Medea and Other Plays, Medea, opening
The Nurse describes Medea refusing food, weeping and turning from her children after Jason’s betrayal.
- Medea and Other Plays, Heracles, madness episode
In a related Euripidean tragedy, Heracles kills his family under divinely imposed madness and awakens to horror.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XIV (October 1863)
Willie's typhoid on the steamer Atlantic, the attending army surgeon's warning, death at the Gayoso Hotel, and Sherman's self-reproach and midnight letter.
- Metamorphoses, Book VI
Niobe, grieving her slaughtered children, turns to weeping stone.
- Mother Courage and Her Children, Scene 3
Courage must not show recognition when Swiss Cheese's body is brought before her.
- Mother Courage and Her Children, Scenes 9 and 12
Hunger in the war-ruined countryside; Courage's lullaby over her dead daughter.
- Mrs. Dalloway, Midday, Septimus's history
Evans's death in Italy, Septimus's pride at feeling nothing, the panic in Milan that drives him to propose to Lucrezia, and the later discovery that he cannot feel or taste.
- Mrs. Dalloway, Evening, the party
Clarissa's meditation in the little room on the young man's death, on defiance and communication, and her return to her guests.
- My Ántonia, Book I (c. Ch. 14–16)
Mr Shimerda shoots himself in the barn; the inquest, the debate over burial and the crossroads grave.
- Number the Stars, Chapters 2 and 17
Lise's unopened trunk of wedding things, and the parents' final account of her death.
- O Captain! My Captain!, Stanza 2, lines 13-16
The speaker cradles the captain's head and tries to treat the death as a dream.
- Old Yeller, Final chapter
Travis's grief after the shooting and Papa's words to him on his return.
- On Fairy-Stories, Recovery and consolation
On Fairy-Stories gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is oblique: tolkien treats imagination as recovery from dulled perception and as consolation amid suffering rather than as pathology
- On Friendship, 'Of Friendship', closing pages
Montaigne's description of the dull, half-life he has led since his friend's death.
- Othello, Act 5, Scene 2
Desdemona is smothered and briefly revives; Gratiano reports that grief killed Brabantio; Othello stabs himself.
- Our Town, Death and Attention
Our Town gives this tag concrete force through the medical material is quiet but important: doc gibbs, childbirth, mortality statistics, grief, and the care rituals surrounding death
- Pericles' Funeral Oration, Book II.44
Pericles consoles the parents of the fallen and reflects on why grief is sharpest for blessings long possessed.
- Persuasion, Vol. I, Ch. 11
Captain Benwick's mourning for his dead fiancée; Anne advises him to read more prose and less poetry.
- Poems, The terrible sonnets
Poems gives this tag concrete force through hopkins is important for melancholia, scruple, exhaustion, vocation stress, and the language of inward suffering before modern diagnostic categories
- Poems: First, Second and Third Series, Third Series, Time and Eternity XLVI (Dying)
A dying speaker describes the hushed room, the watchers' dry eyes and the signing away of keepsakes, interrupted by a buzzing fly as sight fails.
- Psalm 23, Psalm 23:4
The valley of the shadow of death verse, the part of the psalm most often spoken at deathbeds and in bereavement.
- Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 3
Romeo poisons himself and Juliet stabs herself; Montague reports that his wife has died of grief.
- Sarah, Plain and Tall, Chapter 1
Anna recalls her mother's death the morning after Caleb was born and the quiet that followed; Caleb asks whether Mama sang.
- Sarah, Plain and Tall, Chapters 5-9
Papa begins to sing again as Sarah settles in, a sign of the household slowly coming out of mourning.
- Selected Sermons, Sermons on affliction and providence
Calvin frames suffering as a field for trust, correction, endurance, and communal support.
- Selected Sermons, Sermons addressed to the downcast
Spurgeon repeatedly offers consolation to hearers experiencing despair, guilt, grief, and spiritual darkness.
- Selected Sermons, Sermons on assurance and love
Moody's repeated invitation to trust functions as consolation for anxious and grieving hearers.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. II, Ch. 7–9
Marianne's grief after Willoughby's letter: refusal of food, sleeplessness and hysterical weeping, while Elinor attends her.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'Om'
Kamala dies of a snakebite; later, Siddhartha's grief over his son is healed by listening to the river.
- Sixty Stories, 'The School'
A teacher recounts the cascade of deaths affecting his class and the children's questions about death.
- Sixty Stories, 'Views of My Father Weeping'
A son investigates his father's death in a carriage accident while visions of the weeping father intrude.
- Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, Chapter I
His mother's cancer, the operation at home, her death, and the change in the family.
- Tanglewood Tales, The Dragon's Teeth
Strangers think Telephassa is out of her mind with grief; she grows feeble and dies asking for a good long rest.
- Tanglewood Tales, The Pomegranate Seeds
Ceres in her grief withholds the harvest so that fields and cattle starve, while Proserpina refuses all food for six months in Pluto's palace.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Roland's death)
Brittain learns that Roland has died of wounds, and later receives his returned kit, still muddy and bloodstained.
- The Aeneid, Book 2
Aeneas narrates the fall of Troy, Priam’s death and the loss of Creusa as survivor testimony.
- The Aeneid, Book 4
Dido’s passion, abandonment, curse and suicide dominate the Carthage episode.
- The Aeneid, Books 9–12
Battle scenes linger over wounds, young deaths and grieving parents.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 50–52
In a drunken quarrel Alexander kills Cleitus, then lies prostrate with remorse for days.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 72
Hephaestion dies of fever after eating against his doctor's orders; Alexander has the physician executed and mourns extravagantly.
- The Agricola and the Germania, Agricola 45–46
Tacitus' lament and address to the dead Agricola, a classical consolation.
- The Alexiad, Preface, 3–4
Nikephoros Bryennios returns from campaign with a fatal internal tumour; the family forbids him to talk for fear it may burst; Anna's grief.
- The Alexiad, Book XV, last illness
The physicians' dispute over purging, Alexios's breathlessness and swelling, the family's vigil, and his death in August 1118.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, recognition scene
Agave gradually recognizes she carries her son’s head and enters catastrophic grief.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 1.28–1.47
Arjuna's physical and emotional collapse: trembling, dry mouth, burning skin, a reeling mind and refusal to fight.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 2.11–2.30
Krishna's argument that the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead, because the self is eternal.
- The Bible, Genesis 35:16–20
Rachel dies in hard labour giving birth to Benjamin.
- The Bronze Bow, Opening chapters
Daniel tells Joel and Thacia how his father was crucified, his mother died of grief, and Leah has been afraid to leave the house ever since.
- The Brothers Karamazov, Murder and trial
The Brothers Karamazov gives this tag concrete force through its medical material includes epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism, trauma, patricidal obsession, suicidal despair, and the contagious psychology of families
- The Complete Poems, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Whitman's Lincoln elegy turns national mourning into ritualized grief and meditation on death.
- The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 1, opening
Boethius lies grieving in prison until Philosophy appears and diagnoses his condition.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablets VII-VIII
Enkidu dreams of the gods' council and of the house of dust, falls sick, lies ill for twelve days and dies; Gilgamesh laments him and will not yield the body until decay begins.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablets IX-X
Gilgamesh wanders in skins with hollow cheeks and a face like one who has travelled far; each figure he meets asks why he looks so ravaged, and he tells of his grief and fear of death.
- The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Suffering and anxiety chapters
Descriptions of grief, fear, anxiety, and bodily signs are useful for histories of affect and psychiatry.
- The Giver, Chapter 20
The Giver tells how his daughter Rosemary, overwhelmed by painful memories, asked to be released, and how the people suffered when her memories returned.
- The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, Part III, IV: The Life and Labors of Heracles
A madness sent by a goddess drives the young Heracles to kill his brother's children; afterwards sleep and rest leave him, and he goes to Delphi to be purified.
- The Great Gatsby, Chapter VIII
Wilson's night of grief with Michaelis, his fixation on the billboard eyes as the eyes of God, and the murder of Gatsby and Wilson's suicide.
- The Hiding Place, Chapters 9-10
Corrie, sick with influenza, is arrested in the raid; her elderly father dies some ten days after the arrest while she is in solitary confinement.
- The Homeric Hymns, Hymn II, To Demeter, ll. 40-53 and 301-320
Demeter's mourning and fasting, then the year of barren fields that nearly destroys mankind.
- The Iliad, Book 18.22–35
Achilles learns of Patroclus' death: he pours ashes on his head, tears his hair and groans so terribly that Antilochus fears he will cut his own throat.
- The Iliad, Book 19
Achilles refuses food before battle; Athena sustains him with nectar and ambrosia.
- The Iliad, Book 24.1–18
Achilles, sleepless, weeps and drags Hector's body around Patroclus' tomb each dawn.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter V, typical dreams
Dreams of embarrassment at nakedness, examination dreams and dreams of the death of loved persons, leading to the Oedipus and Hamlet readings and the discussion of childhood sexuality and sibling rivalry.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter VII, opening
The dream of the burning child, reported by a patient from a lecture, and Freud's account of how external perception and grief enter a dream.
- The Jewish War, Book 5, Jerusalem under siege
Crowding, corpses, factional violence and the shrinking food supply turn Jerusalem into a public health crisis before the final assault.
- The Jewish War, Book 6, famine in Jerusalem
The famine reaches its most extreme form, including the story of a mother driven to cannibalism, which Josephus uses as a sign of social and bodily collapse.
- The Jungle Book, Mowgli's Brothers, ending
Mowgli sobs for the first time and asks Bagheera whether he is dying.
- The Last Battle, Chapter 14: Night Falls on Narnia
Tirian and the children watch the death of the Narnian world and grieve for it before Peter shuts the door.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Phaedo 116a–118a
The bath, the farewell, the friends' weeping, the drinking of the hemlock and the ascending numbness until death.
- The Last of the Mohicans, Chapter XXXIII
Munro sinks into melancholy at Cora's funeral, and Tamenund, worn by great age, laments having lived too long.
- The Little Prince, Chapters XXVI-XXVII
The snake's bite, the prince's quiet fall, and the narrator's grief in the years afterward.
- The Mabinogion, Branwen the Daughter of Llyr
The cauldron of renovation returns dead warriors to fighting strength but without speech; Bran is wounded in the foot by a poisoned dart; Branwen dies of grief.
- The Magician's Nephew, Chapter 1: The Wrong Door
Digory tells Polly that his father is in India and his mother is ill and going to die.
- The Magician's Nephew, Chapter 12: Strawberry's Adventure
Digory asks Aslan for something to cure his mother and sees great tears in the Lion's eyes.
- The Meek One, Author's preface
Dostoevsky describes the narrator's state of shock and disordered thinking hours after the suicide.
- The Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 3–4
Her jump from the window holding an icon, Lukerya's account, and the narrator's anguish over the body.
- The Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 'A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day'
A meditation on the longest night in which the speaker describes himself as the quintessence of nothingness after a loved one's death.
- The Metaphysical Poets, Henry King, 'An Exequy to his Matchless Never to be Forgotten Friend'
King's elegy for his young wife, longing to join her in the grave.
- The Murder on the Links, Chapter 5, Mrs. Renauld's Story
Mrs. Renauld, viewing her husband's body, falls in a dead faint; Poirot later treats the collapse as evidence of real grief.
- The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, The Third Remove
Nine days caring for her wounded daughter until Sarah dies at Wenimesset, and the remedy of oaken leaves for her own wound, learned from a fellow captive.
- The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, Closing reflections
Sleepless nights of weeping after her restoration, which she interprets through Psalm 6.
- The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, opening chapters
Quinn's bereavement, pseudonymous writing life and willingness to answer a call meant for another person set up identity as a fragile compensatory structure.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 17-19
Kriemhild's mourning over Siegfried's body becomes the emotional and political source of the revenge plot.
- The Odyssey, Book 4
Helen mixes a drug into wine that suppresses grief and anger, a striking ancient fantasy of pharmacological emotional control.
- The Odyssey, Book 11
The underworld journey stages grief, memory, sacrificial blood and conversation with the dead.
- The Oresteia, Agamemnon, murder aftermath
Clytemnestra presents the killing as payment for Iphigenia and reveals grief turned into lethal purpose.
- The Oresteia, Libation Bearers, tomb scene
Electra and Orestes perform mourning at Agamemnon’s grave and convert lament into revenge.
- The Oresteia, Eumenides, opening and trial
The Furies embody pursuit, sleepless accusation and blood guilt until redirected by Athena.
- The Pearl, Chapter 6
The rifleman's shot at the cry in the cave kills Coyotito; Juana and Kino carry him back to La Paz.
- The Plague, Part V
Tarrou's death in Rieux's home, nursed by Rieux and his mother, and the telegram announcing the death of Rieux's wife at the sanatorium.
- The Poetic Edda, Guthrunarkvitha I
Guthrun sits dry-eyed beside Sigurth's body while other women tell their sorrows, until his face is uncovered and she weeps.
- The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, Odour of Chrysanthemums
Walter Bates is brought home dead from the pit; his wife and mother wash and dress the body in the parlour.
- The Ramayana, Book II, Cantos LXIII-LXIV
Dasaratha tells Kausalya of the hermit's son he once shot by mistake and the parents' curse, then dies of grief for the exiled Rama.
- The Raven, Stanzas 1-2
Midnight sleeplessness and the attempt to find relief from sorrow in books.
- The Raven, Stanza 14
The speaker imagines a heaven-sent drug of forgetting and begs to drink it, a pharmacological wish for relief from memory.
- The Raven, Stanzas 15-18
Escalating questions about healing and reunion end in the speaker's own declaration that his soul will never rise from the shadow.
- The Secret Garden, Archibald Craven's return
The father's grief and withdrawal are treated through dream, memory and reunion with the recovered child.
- The Sign of the Beaver, Chapter 17
Attean tells Matt how his mother was killed and his father went after the killers and did not return; his grandmother's bitterness is explained.
- The Sign of the Beaver, Chapter 25
The family arrives and explains the delay: all were sick with typhus, and the baby born in Massachusetts has died.
- The Silver Chair, Chapter 16: The Healing of Harms
Old King Caspian returns from his voyage, blesses Rilian and dies; on Aslan's mountain the dead king lies in the stream before he is made young.
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., The Broken Heart
Crayon argues that women can die of disappointed love and tells of a betrothed girl who wastes away in melancholy after her lover's execution.
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., The Widow and Her Son; Rural Funerals
A poor widow mourns her only son, a sailor who comes home to die; Crayon describes English burial flowers and reflects on the sorrow for the dead.
- The Song of Hiawatha, Canto XV, Hiawatha's Lamentation
Seven weeks of mourning for Chibiabos, ended by the Medas' herbal drink, chants and medicine-dance; Hiawatha then teaches simples, antidotes and the art of healing.
- The Song of Hiawatha, Canto XIX, The Ghosts
Two ghosts sit in silence in the wigwam and then ask the living not to burden the dead with lamentation and grave-goods.
- The Song of Hiawatha, Canto XX, The Famine
Famine and Fever enter the wigwam; Minnehaha's delirium and death; Hiawatha sits seven days speechless.
- The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter XI, Of the Passing of the First-Born
The birth of Burghardt, his illness in Atlanta, the watch beside him as the physician comes and goes, his death and burial, and the father's mixed grief and consolation.
- The Story of a Soul, Chapter II
Her mother's death in August 1877, the Extreme Unction she witnessed, and the change in her temperament afterward.
- The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), Chapter XXIX
Brynhild lies abed as one dead, will not answer Gunnar, and speaks only of her wrongs before she demands Sigurd's death.
- The Stranger, Part One, Chapter 1
The vigil among the elderly residents of the home at Marengo and the funeral procession, in which Pérez collapses in the heat.
- The Sword in the Stone, The boar hunt
Master Twyti weeps over his dead hound after the boar is killed.
- The Theban Plays, Oedipus the King, recognition
Jocasta dies by hanging and Oedipus blinds himself after discovering his birth and crimes.
- The Theban Plays, Antigone, burial conflict
Antigone insists on rites for the dead despite state prohibition, making grief a public act.
- The Theban Plays, Antigone, final messenger speech
Antigone, Haemon and Eurydice die by suicide after Creon’s delayed repentance.
- The Trojan Women and Other Plays, The Trojan Women, Andromache scene
Andromache argues that death is mere not-being and better than a life of grief; Hecuba replies that life always holds hope.
- The Trojan Women and Other Plays, The Trojan Women, burial of Astyanax
Hecuba washes and dresses her grandson's broken body on Hector's shield, in one of the longest laments in Greek tragedy.
- The Waves, Percival's death
The group absorbs Percival's sudden death as a disruption of shared identity and private desire.
- Theogony and Works and Days, Theogony, ll. 75-103
The Muses, daughters of Memory, give a song that lets a grieving man forget his sorrow.
- Thoughts on Government and Selected Letters, Late Adams-Jefferson correspondence
Aging, grief, memory, and mortality shape the retrospective friendship.
- Through Gates of Splendor, Chapters on the search
The wives wait at Shell Mera through the days of silence while the search party goes to Palm Beach.
- Through Gates of Splendor, Closing chapters
Burial of the men near the sandbar and the widows' reflections on loss and faith.
- Till We Have Faces, Part One, Chapters 1 and 20
The Fox counsels the princesses with Stoic maxims on death and loss, and later grows old and dies in Orual's service.
- To the Lighthouse, Part III, The Lighthouse
Lily's delayed grief for Mrs Ramsay overtakes her on the lawn as she paints.
- Travels with My Aunt, Opening funeral
Henry's mother's funeral initiates grief, family uncertainty and a late-life identity crisis.
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, A Song of Despair
The closing poem gathers erotic loss into lament, grief and depressive imagery.
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Part II, Chapter XXI, A Hecatomb
After sinking the warship, Nemo kneels before the portrait of a young woman and two children and breaks into sobs.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapter XII; Chapter XVIII
Lucy drowns herself from Haley's boat after her child is sold; old Prue drinks to forget the child she lost.
- War and Peace, Book Nine, Ch. XVI
Natásha's illness after the broken engagement and Tolstoy's reflections on the limits of the doctors who attend her.
- Washington Square, Early Sloper household chapters
Dr. Sloper's grief over his wife and disappointment in Catherine establish a physician-father whose intelligence is emotionally punitive.
- Where the Red Fern Grows, The mountain lion
Old Dan is mortally wounded fighting the lion and dies; Little Ann refuses food and dies on his grave.
- Where the Red Fern Grows, Chapter 20
Billy's grief is eased when the family finds the red fern between the graves and Papa and Mama speak of God's purposes.
- Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore chapters
Friends include the gloomy donkey.
- Wuthering Heights, Hindley's decline
Hindley's alcoholism, gambling and violence after Frances's death damage Hareton and the household.
- Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's final days
Heathcliff's visions of Catherine, refusal of food and death show grief as obsessive bodily unraveling.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”
“use the consolations of reason in this case, and you were as good preach ease to one on the rack, and hope to allay, by rational discourses, the pain of his joints tearing asunder”
Frequently cited
“Nothing I have ever had to meet in all my life, before or since, wounded me so deeply.”
“The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord! I was--I am a minister of the Gospel. Leave him to me”
“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”
“At this grief my heart was utterly darkened; and whatever I beheld was death”
“my birth cost my mother her life, and was the first of my misfortunes”
“Dear to me was your beautiful ruddiness; dear to me your comely form; dear to me your clear grey eye; dear to me your wisdom and your talk.”
“I loved but once, yet twice I lose my love!”
“Never say about anything, I have lost it, but say I have restored it.”
“for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves”
“If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I”
“when a star fell down a soul mounted up to God.”
“Not until you are dying do you know your children”
“they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of 'indifferent' nature; they tell us, too, of eternal reconciliation and of life without end.”
Frequently cited
“the parting with my wife and poor children, hath often been to me in this place, as the pulling the flesh from the bones”
“Put the case that the mind of that philanthropist were clouded by sorrow of his own, extinguishing all sympathy with the lot of others”
Frequently cited
“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance”
“all who had the good fortune to be in health were sitting in their houses, either attending the sick or mourning the dead.”
“Dear child, be pious and good, and God will always take care of you, and I will look down upon you from heaven, and will be with you.”
“I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed; Looking-Glass is dead, Ta-hool-hool-shute is dead. The old men are all dead.”
“I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead.”
Frequently cited
“Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”
“Listen, all ye mothers, listen, Learn from me a tale of wisdom: Never urge unwilling daughters From the dwellings of their fathers, To the bridegrooms that they love not,”
Frequently cited
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, They kill us for their sport”
Frequently cited
“for queens I might have enow, but such a fellowship of good knights shall never be together in no company.”
Frequently cited
“thou were the courteoust knight that ever bare shield. And thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrad horse.”
“I bless thee, Orlando; I bless thy whole life, and all that thou wast, and all that thou ever didst, and the father that begat thee;”
“His hour had struck; we bore him to the death-room, poor boy.”
Frequently cited
“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”
Frequently cited
“Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing”
“O judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason. Bear with me. My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me.”
Frequently cited
“Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow, A herb most bruised is woman”
“I could not help reproaching myself for having consented to his visit in that sickly region in the summer-time”
“Being in the very midst of an important military enterprise, I had hardly time to pause and think of my personal loss”
“The child that bore my name, and in whose future I reposed with more confidence than I did in my own plan of life, now floats a mere corpse, seeking a grave in a distant land, with a weeping mother, brother, and sisters, clustered about him”
“Their loss has left a heartsore that will stay with me to the last day of my life.”
“Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead.”
Frequently cited
“Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.”
“For it is only the love of honour that never grows old; and honour it is, not gain, as some would have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness.”
“All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone”
“Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby”
“Everything else is a dream, save that.”
“Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality”
Frequently cited
“What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love”
“Yet this my comfort; when your words are done, My woes end likewise with the evening sun.”
“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
“Father, don’t you see that I am burning”
“Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend; concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best”
“Tell them, that the Being we all worship, under different names, will be mindful of their charity; and that the time shall not be distant when we may assemble around His throne without distinction of sex, or rank, or color.”
Frequently cited
“My day has been too long. In the morning I saw the sons of Unamis happy and strong; and yet, before the night has come, have I lived to see the last warrior of the wise race of the Mohicans.”
Frequently cited
“woe is me that I was ever born; two islands have been destroyed because of me!”
“They are all gone into the world of light”
Frequently cited
“Men shall learn wisdom, by affliction schooled”
“men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony”
Frequently cited
“the shaft flew through Baldr, and he fell dead to the earth; and that was the greatest mischance that has ever befallen among gods and men.”
Frequently cited
“She knew she submitted to life, which was her immediate master. But from death, her ultimate master, she winced with fear and shame.”
“From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore— For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Nameless here for evermore.”
“Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
“Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”
Frequently cited
“And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!”
“I believe in broken hearts, and the possibility of dying of disappointed love!”
Frequently cited
“The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced.”
“Straightway from his brain departed All his moody melancholy;”
“Farewell, O my Laughing Water! All my heart is buried with you, All my thoughts go onward with you!”
Frequently cited
“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know.”
Frequently cited
“Therefore wait to see life’s ending ere thou count one mortal blest; Wait till free from pain and sorrow he has gained his final rest”
“Death cannot be what Life is, Child; the cup Of Death is empty, and Life hath always hope.”
“terrified Nature seizes upon _madness_ as the last resource of life”
“For though a man have sorrow and grief in his newly-troubled soul and live in dread because his heart is distressed, yet, when a singer, the servant of the Muses, chants the glorious deeds of men of old and the blessed gods who inhabit Olympus, at once he forgets his heaviness and remembers not his sorrows at all”
“Yes, forgotten by all else, but not by us. We dug the grave, and the polypi undertake to seal our dead for eternity.”
“I am the law, and I am the judge! I am the oppressed, and there is the oppressor! Through him I have lost all that I loved, cherished, and venerated”
“I can love you; I do, and I’ll try to help you to grow up a good Christian girl.”
Frequently cited
“The story went on to say that only an angel could plant the seeds of a red fern, and that they never died; where one grew, that spot was sacred.”
Frequently cited
“I'm sure the red fern has grown and has completely covered the two little mounds.”
Frequently cited
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”
Frequently cited
“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad”