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.
Medical tag
Neurosis Anxiety
Dread, panic, phobia, nervous agitation, hypochondriacal worry.
Works
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen Dedalus, a boy from a Catholic Dublin family, from his earliest memories to the eve of his departure from Ireland at about twenty. Its five chapters are written in a style that grows with him, from the nursery language of the opening, in which his father tells him a story about a moocow and baby tuckoo, to the abstract arguments and private diary of the last chapter.
A Theologico-Political Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) was published anonymously in Latin in Amsterdam in 1670, under a false Hamburg imprint, by the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Its title page announces its purpose: to show that freedom to philosophize can be granted without harm to piety or the peace of the commonwealth, and cannot be withheld without destroying both.
Hume subtitled his first book 'an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects', and he meant it literally: as Newton had explained the heavens by a few observed principles, Hume would explain belief, emotion and morality by a few principles of the mind. Book I, Of the Understanding, begins by dividing all perceptions into vivid impressions and fainter ideas, and holds that every simple idea is copied from a prior impression.
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.
Bedtime for Frances is a picture book about a little badger who cannot settle down for the night. At seven o'clock Mother and Father tell Frances it is bedtime, and she begins a string of requests: a glass of milk, a piggyback ride to her room, a kiss from each parent, her teddy bear and her doll, and then another round of kisses.
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
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.
Sallust wrote two short monographs on episodes of the late Roman Republic, each opened by a philosophical preface and each meant to show how ambition and greed were corrupting the state. The library text is the Rev. John Selby Watson's literal English version, with his argument (chapter outline) before each work and his explanatory notes after it.
Characters is a collection of brief sketches of recognizable social types: the dissembler, flatterer, chatterer, boor, complaisant man, reckless man, tactless man, mean man, show-off, coward, oligarchic sympathizer, late learner, slanderer and many others. Each sketch begins with a definition and then offers small scenes in which the type reveals himself through repeated behavior.
Chess (Schachnovelle, also translated as The Royal Game or Chess Story) is narrated by a passenger on a liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic, a stolid, almost illiterate son of a poor Danube boatman who was raised by a village priest, revealed an uncanny talent for chess, and now plays mechanically and greedily for money, showing no curiosity about anything else.
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.
Death in Venice follows the last weeks of Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German writer in his fifties, ennobled on his fiftieth birthday, whose prose epic on Frederick the Great and other works have made him a model of disciplined art. Thomas Mann published the novella in 1912, and it is told in five chapters by a narrator who comments on Aschenbach with a mixture of sympathy and irony.
Democracy in America is Tocqueville's great comparative study of democratic society. The first volume examines American political institutions: township government, federalism, courts, associations, parties, newspapers, religion, and the habits that sustain self-government.
Destruction and Creation and the OODA Loop Briefings gather John Boyd's strategic thought from thermodynamics and epistemology to conflict, command, and adaptation. Destruction and Creation argues that organisms and organizations must break apart old mental concepts and rebuild new ones in order to cope with a changing reality.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
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.
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.
Effi Briest opens at Hohen-Cremmen, the Brandenburg estate of the Briest family, where seventeen-year-old Effi, playful and still half a child, is suddenly engaged to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old district administrator who long ago courted her mother. Effi accepts, partly from ambition and partly from a wish for excitement, and the couple marry and move to Kessin, a small Baltic resort town in Pomerania.
Emma Woodhouse, not quite twenty-one, is the clever, handsome and wealthy mistress of Hartfield, a house in the Surrey village of Highbury, where she keeps company with her fond, fretful and health-obsessed widowed father. When her governess and friend Miss Taylor marries the genial widower Mr. Weston, Emma credits herself with the match and resolves to arrange more.
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.
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.
Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J. Hollingdale from Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena, the two volumes of 'appendices and omissions' he published in 1851 to make his system available to general readers. The book that resulted is the opposite of a treatise: short, sardonic, quotable pieces on suffering, death, religion, women, reading, noise, ethics and psychology, all resting on the metaphysics of his early masterpiece.
David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political first appeared anonymously in Edinburgh in two volumes in 1741 and 1742, after his Treatise of Human Nature had, in his own phrase, fallen dead-born from the press. Written in the manner of Addison's Spectator for a polite reading public, they brought the philosophy of the Treatise to bear on British politics, religion, taste and manners.
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.
Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated on Saturday, 4 March 1933, at the low point of the Great Depression. About a quarter of the work force was unemployed, farm prices had collapsed, and in the weeks before the ceremony a wave of bank runs had led governors in most states to close or restrict their banks.
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.
Homilies on the Statues records Chrysostom preaching to Antioch during a civic emergency in 387. After unpopular imperial taxes provoked unrest, a crowd in Antioch insulted and damaged statues of Emperor Theodosius and his family.
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.
Institutes of the Christian Religion is John Calvin's ordered account of Christian doctrine, written to train readers in godliness and to show the King of France what his persecuted evangelical subjects actually believed. The library text opens with the Prefatory Address to Francis I, which pleads that the Reformers teach nothing new but the faith of Scripture and the early fathers, and with Calvin's Epistle to the Reader, dated Geneva, 1 August 1559, in which he says he was never satisfied until the work was set in its present order.
Frederick wrote the treatise known in English as Instructions for His Generals in the winter of 1746–1747, after the first two Silesian Wars had won and held the rich Austrian province of Silesia. Its French title was Les Principes généraux de la guerre; a German version, Die General-Principia vom Kriege, was printed in 1748 in a small number of copies for Prussian generals, who were bound to keep it secret.
Lectures on Revivals of Religion is Finney's manual of revival as method. Where Edwards treats awakening as a surprising work to be interpreted cautiously, Finney argues that revivals are not miracles in the sense of being beyond means.
Letters and Papers from Prison was assembled after the war by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, former student and nephew by marriage, and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung ('Resistance and Submission'). It gathers what Bonhoeffer wrote during two years of imprisonment by the Nazi state, together with the essay 'After Ten Years', composed at Christmas 1942 as a stocktaking for fellow conspirators.
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.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Lord Jim begins with an omniscient narrator describing Jim, a young English parson's son who went to sea after reading light holiday literature and dreams of heroic deeds. Injured by a falling spar, he recovers in an Eastern port and takes a berth as chief mate of the Patna, a decrepit steamer carrying eight hundred Muslim pilgrims across the Arabian Sea.
Mere Christianity is C. S. Lewis's case for, and plain explanation of, the beliefs held in common by Christians of most denominations. In the preface Lewis borrows the phrase "mere Christianity" from the Puritan writer Richard Baxter and compares the shared faith to a hall from which doors open into the rooms of the separate churches; he says he is describing the hall, not recommending a room, and that people must eventually live in a room rather than in the hall.
Napoleon's Maxims of War is not a book Napoleon wrote but a compilation made by a French officer, General Burnod, who in 1827 published Maximes de guerre de Napoléon, drawn from the emperor's memoirs dictated on St Helena and other sources. The British officer George Charles D'Aguilar translated it into English in 1831, adding explanatory notes with examples from the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Montecuccoli, Frederick the Great and Napoleon himself.
Northanger Abbey follows Catherine Morland, the unremarkable seventeen-year-old daughter of a country clergyman, whom the narrator teasingly insists no one would have supposed born to be a heroine. Catherine is a devoted reader of Gothic novels, especially Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.
Notes from Underground is a short novel in two parts, presented as the private notes of an unnamed retired civil servant of forty who lives in a shabby room on the edge of St. Petersburg. A footnote signed by the author explains that the writer of the notes is imaginary but represents a type produced by Russian society of the time.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
On War (Vom Kriege) is an unfinished philosophical inquiry into the nature of war, written by a Prussian staff officer who had lived through the Napoleonic transformation of warfare. It is organised in eight books, but Clausewitz left a note in 1827 saying that only the first chapter of Book I satisfied him, and he was revising the whole when he died.
Passing is a short novel in three parts, told in close third person through the consciousness of Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black woman married to a Harlem physician. It opens with a letter that stirs Irene's memory of an encounter two years earlier.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant were written in a race against death. In the spring of 1884 the brokerage firm of Grant & Ward collapsed through his partner's fraud, leaving the former president living on borrowed money.
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.
Pride and Prejudice turns courtship into a discipline of moral interpretation. Elizabeth Bennet first judges Fitzwilliam Darcy by his proud refusal to dance and by Wickham's persuasive account of injury, while Darcy judges Elizabeth through the embarrassment of her family, the inferiority of her connections, and his own rank.
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.
Whitefield's Selected Sermons preserve the voice of the eighteenth century's most famous evangelical itinerant. His preaching emphasized new birth, heartfelt conversion, human sin, Christ's mercy, and the immediate demand that hearers respond.
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.
Selected Sermons and Reformation Treatises gathers the Luther who speaks from pulpit, classroom, controversy, and pastoral desk. The center is not one genre but a reformatory voice: the Ninety-Five Theses against indulgence abuse, The Freedom of a Christian, sermons on faith and good works, catechetical teaching, and occasional writings shaped by conflict.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
Donne's Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions bring the metaphysical imagination into pulpit and sickroom. The sermons, including Death's Duel, display a preacher fascinated by mortality, judgment, resurrection, the body, and the unstable boundary between private self and Christian community.
This paired entry sets Jonathan Edwards's most famous terror sermon beside his narrative of revival in Northampton and neighboring towns. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is often remembered for its imagery of danger, wrath, and suspended judgment, but its structure is theological before it is theatrical.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens at Arthur's Christmas court, where a green stranger interrupts the feast with a beheading game. Gawain accepts the challenge, cuts off the Green Knight's head, and must seek the Green Chapel a year later to receive the return blow.
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.
Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) is the first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, which C. K. Scott Moncrieff translated under the title Remembrance of Things Past. Grasset issued it at Proust's expense in November 1913.
This selection gathers six of Edgar Allan Poe's best-known tales, two of them detective stories and four of them tales of terror, written between 1839 and 1846 and printed here from the Raven Edition of his works. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) opens with an essay on the analytical mind and introduces C. Auguste Dupin, a poor but brilliant Parisian gentleman who shares lodgings with the unnamed narrator.
The Annals of Imperial Rome narrates the Julio-Claudian empire from the death of Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, though parts are lost. Tacitus writes history as the psychology of autocracy.
The Art of War is a short treatise of thirteen chapters, around six thousand Chinese characters, written as a sequence of terse sayings introduced by the formula 'Sun Tzu said'. It begins by declaring war a matter of life and death for the state, to be studied through five constant factors: the moral law that binds people to their ruler, heaven (weather and seasons), earth (terrain and distance), the commander's qualities, and method and discipline.
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 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 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 Death of Ivan Ilyich begins at the end. In the law courts, colleagues of Ivan Ilyich Golovin read in the newspaper of his death, and each thinks first of the promotions and transfers it will bring.
The Early Christian Creeds gathers short doctrinal texts that became durable summaries of Christian identity: baptismal symbols, conciliar formulas and later Western confessions. The Old Roman Symbol and the Apostles' Creed preserve the shape of early baptismal confession: belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, the Spirit, the church, forgiveness, resurrection and life.
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.
The Fall is a short novel in six chapters made up entirely of the monologue of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a Frenchman living in Amsterdam, who over five days talks to a stranger he meets at a sailors' bar called Mexico City. The listener never speaks in the text; his replies are implied by Clamence's answers.
The Hound of the Baskervilles brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to Dartmoor to investigate a family curse. It opens in Baker Street with a walking stick left by a visitor, from which Holmes deduces a young country doctor with a curly-haired spaniel.
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 Life of Samuel Johnson is James Boswell's account of the poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), arranged year by year and built largely from conversations Boswell wrote down over twenty-one years of friendship. It opens with Johnson's birth in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller, his childhood scrofula, for which his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, and his schooling.
Izaak Walton's Lives are short, affectionate biographies of English churchmen, written by a London tradesman and angler who loved the Church of England and the men who served it. The library text is the second volume of the Cassell's National Library edition of 1898, based on John Major's 1825 edition with Austin Dobson's notes, and contains three of the five lives: Richard Hooker (first published 1665), George Herbert (1670) and Robert Sanderson (1678); the lives of Donne and Wotton belong to the first volume and are not included.
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The Merchant of Venice joins two stories, a bond for a pound of flesh and a lottery of caskets, and moves between the commercial city of Venice and Belmont, the country estate of the heiress Portia. Antonio, a wealthy merchant, opens the play sad without knowing why.
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.
Les Passions de l'âme, published in Amsterdam and Paris in November 1649, was Descartes's last book and his fullest account of how mind and body interact in emotional life. It grew out of his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who in 1643 had asked him how an immaterial thinking soul could move a body, and who later pressed him on the regulation of grief and the good life.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Portrait of a Lady follows Isabel Archer, a young American woman brought to Europe by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, and admired for her intelligence, independence and hunger for experience. At Gardencourt, the English estate of her uncle, Isabel meets her invalid cousin Ralph Touchett, who loves her imaginatively and persuades his dying father to leave her a fortune so that she can live freely.
The Practice of the Presence of God gathers four conversations with, and fifteen letters by, Brother Lawrence, a lay brother of the Discalced Carmelites in Paris who spent his days in the friary kitchen. The conversations were written down by a visitor, traditionally identified as Joseph de Beaufort, who first met him on 3 August 1666.
The Prince is a short treatise in twenty-six chapters that Machiavelli wrote in 1513, shortly after losing his post in the Florentine chancery, and dedicated, in its final form, to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. In the dedication he offers the Medici what he calls his knowledge of the actions of great men, gained from long experience of modern affairs and continual reading of ancient ones.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a long essay in two parts asking why modern rational capitalism, with its disciplined, systematic pursuit of profit as a duty, arose first and most strongly in the Protestant lands of the West. Weber does not argue that Protestantism caused capitalism, and he says so explicitly; he argues that certain forms of Protestant belief helped produce an ethos, a moral attitude toward work and wealth, that fitted the needs of a new economic order.
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 Red Badge of Courage follows Henry Fleming, a young private of the 304th New York, through two days of fighting in an unnamed Civil War battle that readers have long identified with Chancellorsville in May 1863. Crane calls him almost always simply the youth.
The Screwtape Letters is a book of thirty-one letters written by Screwtape, a senior devil in the bureaucracy of Hell, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter on his first assignment. Wormwood's charge is a young Englishman, never named and called only the patient, who lives with his mother at the outbreak of the Second World War.
The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening was published in Copenhagen on 30 July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor. Its title comes from Jesus' words about Lazarus in John 11:4, 'This sickness is not unto death.' The introduction argues that for the Christian even death is not the sickness unto death, since there is hope beyond it; the true sickness unto death is despair, a condition in which one cannot die and cannot live, a perpetual dying without end.
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 My Life is Helen Keller's account of her first twenty-two years, written while she was a student at Radcliffe College. She begins at Ivy Green, the family home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, where she was born on June 27, 1880.
The Subjection of Women is John Stuart Mill's extended argument that the legal subordination of women to men in mid-Victorian Britain was wrong in principle and an obstacle to human improvement, and that it should give way to perfect equality before the law. Mill drafted it in 1860–1861, after the death of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, and published it with Longmans in 1869.
Richard Hannay, a thirty-seven-year-old Scottish-born mining engineer who has made his money in Rhodesia, has come home to London in the spring of 1914 and finds himself bored almost to despair. One May evening a neighbor from the top floor of his building, an American named Franklin P. Scudder, begs to be taken in.
The Trial follows Josef K., a respected chief clerk at a large bank in an unnamed city, from the morning of his thirtieth birthday, when two warders appear in his lodgings and tell him he is under arrest, to the eve of his thirty-first, when two men in frock coats lead him to a quarry and kill him. Neither K. nor the reader ever learns what he is accused of or what law he has broken.
The True Story of My Life is the autobiographical sketch Hans Christian Andersen wrote in 1846, at forty-one, for a collected edition of his works. He opens by calling his life a lovely story, happy and full of incident, and says it shows that a loving God directs all things for the best.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
The Vampyre is a brief but enormously influential Gothic tale that turns the vampire from folkloric corpse into a fashionable aristocratic predator. Aubrey, a young gentleman of imagination and moral seriousness, enters London society and becomes fascinated by Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman whose charm is inseparable from coldness.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the third Chronicle of Narnia to be published. Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are spending the summer holidays with their aunt and uncle in Cambridge, where their cousin Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a priggish, bullying boy raised on modern notions, makes them miserable.
The Waste Land is a poem of 433 lines in five parts, dedicated to Ezra Pound and prefaced by a Latin and Greek epigraph from Petronius in which the Sibyl of Cumae, shrivelled in a jar, says she wants to die. Part I, The Burial of the Dead, opens with April as the cruellest month, stirring memory and desire in a dead land.
Walter Hartright, a young London drawing-master, is engaged through his Italian friend Professor Pesca to teach watercolour at Limmeridge House in Cumberland. Walking home across Hampstead Heath late on the night before he leaves, he is touched on the shoulder by a woman dressed entirely in white who asks the way to London and speaks fondly of Limmeridge; soon after, two men in a chaise ask a policeman whether he has seen a woman escaped from an asylum.
Amory Blaine, the only son of the wealthy, eccentric Beatrice Blaine and her ineffectual husband Stephen, is raised in luxury, travels with his mother, and grows up handsome, clever and sure of his own superiority. After two years in Minneapolis and a spell at a New England boarding school, where he is unpopular and then a football hero, he goes to Princeton, drawn by its glamour.
Twelve Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room after a murder trial. Twelve male jurors must decide whether a young defendant is guilty of killing his father; a guilty verdict will mean death.
Understood Betsy follows nine-year-old Elizabeth Ann, an orphan raised in a medium-sized Midwestern city by her Great-aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances, a piano teacher who has studied child-rearing books and correspondence courses and is determined that her niece shall be thoroughly understood. Elizabeth Ann is thin, pale and frightened of dogs, thunder and examinations, and Aunt Frances shares and rehearses every fear with her.
White Nights is narrated by an unnamed young dreamer in St. Petersburg, a lonely man who lives more intensely in imagination than in social life. During the luminous northern nights, he wanders the city and feels intimate with streets, houses and imagined lives while remaining isolated from actual human companionship.
Passages
- A Little Princess, Chapter 12, The Other Side of the Wall
Carrisford and Carmichael recall Carrisford's flight, sleeplessness, delirium and hospital confinement with brain fever.
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter III
The retreat sermons on death and hell and Stephen's physical terror and remorse afterwards.
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter IV
Stephen's systematic mortification of the senses and his anxious accounting of prayers and temptations.
- A Theologico-Political Treatise, Preface
Fear and hope as the sources of superstition, and the exploitation of fearful minds by those in power.
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Sect. 7
Hume's despair, dread of error, sense of monstrous isolation and 'heated' brain, followed by recovery through dining, backgammon and conversation; he names his mood a splenetic humour.
- 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.
- Bedtime for Frances, Tiger, giant, crack and curtains
Successive night fears, each answered by Father, ending in his explanation that everyone has a job.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Three, §47
The 'religious neurosis' linked to solitude, fasting and sexual abstinence, with speculation about disguised epilepsy and mention of alienists studying the Salvation Army.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Six, §208
Scepticism diagnosed as 'nervous debility' produced by mixing of classes and races, an example of degeneration theory applied to culture.
- 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.
- Catiline's War and The Jugurthine War, Catiline's War, ch. XXXI
Gloom and alarm spread through the city; citizens feel safe nowhere and with no one.
- Characters, The Superstitious Man
Ritual fear and omen-reading govern daily behavior in ways that resemble anxiety without being clinical diagnosis.
- Characters, The Coward
Everyday danger is exaggerated into avoidance, excuses and panic.
- Chess, Dr B.'s narrative (isolation)
Months of solitary confinement in a hotel room with no books, no activity and no human contact beyond interrogation.
- Chess, Final scene
During the second game against Czentovic, Dr B.'s agitation and confusion return until the narrator stops him.
- Civilization and Its Discontents, Ch. VII–VIII
The super-ego, unconscious guilt, and the 'need for punishment'; melancholia as the clinical picture of a harsh super-ego; the possibility of diagnosing 'communal neuroses'.
- Confessions, Book VI
The attack of pounding arteries and tinnitus with permanent partial deafness; insomnia; 'the vapors'; reading anatomy and imagining a polyp of the heart; the journey to the physicians of Montpellier and their waters and whey.
- Confessions, Books IX–XII
The growing conviction of a plot by Diderot, Grimm, d'Épinay and others, culminating in the narrative of flight and persecution.
- Death in Venice, Chapter I
Aschenbach, unable to rest after a morning's work and missing his midday sleep, walks out and experiences a hallucination-like vision of a tropical swamp.
- Democracy in America, Volume II, individualism and restlessness
Democratic equality is linked to anxiety, ambition, isolation, and private withdrawal.
- Destruction and Creation and the OODA Loop Briefings, Destruction and Creation
The argument about breaking and rebuilding concepts is relevant to cognitive flexibility under uncertainty.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Philo on why the miserable remain alive: terrified, not bribed, to continue existing; the man of delicate temper as more sensitive and therefore more unhappy.
- Discourses (selection) and Encheiridion, Discourses, "On Anxiety (Solicitude)" (II.13)
Epictetus diagnoses the anxious man, pale before an audience, as wanting something not in his power.
- Early Poems: A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, North of Boston, A Servant to Servants
The farm wife describes her exhaustion, her doctor's prescription of rest, her stay in the State Asylum, and her family's earlier practice of keeping a mad uncle caged in the house.
- Effi Briest, Kessin chapters (Ch. 8–20)
Effi's night fears of the Chinese ghost and Innstetten's ambiguous refusal to reassure her.
- Emma, Vol. III, Ch. IX
Mrs. Churchill dies suddenly at Richmond; the narrator observes that her death justified her long complaints, and Jane Fairfax's illness worsens.
- Essays, On Superstition (Moralia)
Superstition analysed as fear that gives no rest, intruding into sleep and dreams, worse than atheism.
- Essays, Essay II, Of Death
Fear of death compared to children's fear of the dark; the deathbed's groans and convulsions; passions that overcome the fear of dying; death as natural as birth.
- Essays, Essay XXXI, Of Suspicion
Suspicions as defects 'not in the heart, but in the brain' that dispose wise men to irresolution and melancholy, remedied by learning more.
- Essays and Aphorisms, Parerga II, 'On Noise' (in the Hollingdale selection)
Schopenhauer's complaint that noise, especially the cracking of whips, interrupts and destroys thought.
- Essays, Moral and Political (selection), Of Superstition and Enthusiasm
Superstition traced to weakness, fear and melancholy; enthusiasm to presumption, luxuriant health and strong spirits.
- Fear and Trembling, Tuning Up (Exordium/Attunement)
Four retellings of the journey to Moriah, each followed by an image of a mother weaning her child by blackening her breast.
- Fear and Trembling, Speech in Praise of Abraham
Abraham's long waiting for a child in old age and the three-day ride to Moriah described as an ordeal of expectation and dread.
- Fear and Trembling, Problema III
Studies of concealment, the demonic, and the relief or impossibility of disclosure, including the merman's repentance and Sarah of Tobit's dread on her wedding night.
- First Inaugural Address ("The only thing we have to fear"), Paragraph 1
Fear itself described as nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror that paralyzes the effort to convert retreat into advance.
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, §§5-8
Childhood dreams and visions of devils and hell-fire at nine or ten years old, and their eventual fading.
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, §§33-34
His fear, while watching the bell-ringers, that a bell or the steeple itself would fall and kill him.
- Homilies on the Statues, Opening homilies after the riot
The citywide dread of imperial punishment offers a case study in mass anxiety and pastoral containment.
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chapter XLI, Free at Last
Her constant watch of the newspaper lists of arrivals and the fear of recapture.
- Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book I, ch. 17, secs. 10-11
The many diseases and dangers that threaten life, and providence offered as the remedy for anxious fear.
- Instructions for His Generals, Opening articles on the Prussian troops
Measures to prevent desertion, revealing the coercive conditions and low morale of many soldiers.
- Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Lectures on anxious sinners
The handling of conviction and distress illustrates the deliberate intensification of spiritual anxiety.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Letters to Bethge, late November 1943
Heavy air raids on Berlin; prisoners screaming in locked cells, Bonhoeffer assisting in the sick bay, and his reflections on fear.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Poem 'Who Am I?' (summer 1944)
Contrast between the composed figure others see and the restless, sick, caged inner self.
- Letters from a Stoic, Letters 24 and 26
Death should be contemplated in advance so it loses its power to terrify.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. VI, 'Of the Interiour Beginnings of Voluntary Motions'
Definitions of the passions as forms of appetite and aversion, including fear, grief, anxiety and the 'Panique Terror' of crowds.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. XIII
Life in the natural condition dominated by continual fear and danger of violent death.
- Lord Jim, Ch. 7–11
Jim's account of his paralysis on the Patna deck and the moment he jumped.
- Mere Christianity, Book III, Ch. 4, "Morality and Psychoanalysis"
Lewis separates psychoanalytic treatment of abnormal fears and impulses from the moral choices a patient makes, and says the treatment of the raw material is a medical matter.
- Mere Christianity, Book IV, Ch. 10, "Nice People or New Men"
Lewis contrasts inherited temperament and upbringing with moral effort, arguing that a person with a difficult nervous constitution may be further along than an easy-tempered one.
- Napoleon's Maxims of War, Maxim LXXIII and Note
The commander's cool head and the unsuitability of excitable temperaments; Montecuccoli's advice never to be anxious or change countenance.
- Northanger Abbey, Vol. II, Ch. 8–9
Catherine's suspicions about Mrs Tilney's death and Henry's account of her illness and the physicians who attended her.
- Notes from Underground, Part II, Chapters I–II
The young narrator's fevers, delirium and hysterical rages during his campaign against the officer.
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 1, Iphigenia
Religious fear leads to sacrificial violence, establishing superstition as a psychic and social disease.
- On War, Book I, Ch. 4, Of Danger in War
A guided walk from the staff to the firing line: shells, the fall of an acquaintance, pity for the maimed, and the loss of the power of instantaneous decision in the novice.
- On War, Book I, Ch. 7–8, Friction and Concluding Remarks
Friction as the sum of danger, exertion and uncertainty; habituation compared to the pupil of the eye adapting to a dark room.
- Passing, Part One
Irene, feeling faint in the Chicago heat, takes refuge on the hotel roof and is unnerved by a stranger's stare, with physical symptoms of acute anxiety.
- Passing, Part Two–Three
Irene's growing suspicion of an affair, accompanied by sleeplessness, headaches and intrusive thoughts.
- Pensees, Fragment 82, Section II
Imagination as the 'mistress of error', able to make men healthy or sick; the philosopher sweating on a plank above a precipice; cats, rats and a crushed coal that 'unhinge the reason'; physicians in cassocks and mules; diseases that spoil judgment.
- Pensees, Fragment 109, Section II
Health and sickness each produce their own desires; we take medicine cheerfully when ill; our fears come from imagining a state we are not in.
- Pensees, Fragments 139–143, 164–171, Section II
Diversion: gambling, hunting, war and court office as flight from thought; the king without diversion is wretched; death is easier to bear than the thought of it.
- Poems, The Wreck and suffering
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
- Pride and Prejudice, First impressions
Pride and Prejudice gives this tag concrete force through its medical angle is modest but present in nerves, hypochondriacal comedy, domestic stress, and the social management of women's bodies and futures
- Selected Sermons, Sermons addressing fear and persecution
The pulpit offers anxious refugees and citizens a theological structure for danger.
- Selected Sermons, Conversion sermons
The direct address to unconverted hearers aims to produce conviction, fear, and emotional crisis.
- Selected Sermons, Sermons on assurance and love
Moody's repeated invitation to trust functions as consolation for anxious and grieving hearers.
- Selected Sermons and Reformation Treatises, Sermons and treatises on temptation and conscience
Luther addresses terrified conscience as a condition requiring gospel consolation rather than moral bookkeeping.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', early diary entries
Fever-like malaise, insomnia and nightmares of being strangled and drained in sleep.
- Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Death's Duel
The sermon stages dying as theological confrontation and preparation.
- Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and A Faithful Narrative, Sinners, central warning sequence
The sermon intensifies fear to produce urgent self-examination and conversion anxiety.
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Green Chapel
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight gives this tag concrete force through medical interest gathers around bodily vulnerability: decapitation, fear, dream, the nick on the neck, confession, and shame felt as an embodied wound
- Sixty Stories, 'Game'
Two officers confined in a missile bunker, each watching the other, deteriorate psychologically under rigid protocol.
- Swann's Way, Overture, bedtime scenes
The child's anguish when his mother cannot come up to kiss him, and his father's decision to let her stay the night.
- Swann's Way, Place-Names: The Name
Excitement at the planned spring journey to Florence and Venice brings on a persistent fever, and the doctor forbids travel for a year and anything liable to excite the boy.
- Tales (Selection), The Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator's first interview
Roderick describes his constitutional and family evil: food, clothing, flowers, light and sound all oppress his senses, and he fears the effect of fear itself.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 4, treason trials
Informers and accusations create chronic fear and self-protective speech among elites.
- The Art of War, Ch. VIII.12–14
Five dangerous faults of a general (recklessness, cowardice, hasty temper, sensitivity to shame, over-solicitude for his men), with commentators' examples of generals ruined by each.
- The Art of War, Ch. XI.23–28
Troops in desperate straits lose fear and fight to the death; Sun Tzu describes soldiers weeping on the day of battle and then fighting with the courage of legendary heroes.
- 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 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 Bronze Bow, Final chapters
Leah falls into a high, wasting fever after Daniel drives Marcus away, and Jesus comes to the house and restores her.
- The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 2
Fortune’s mutability is reframed so loss becomes expected rather than metaphysically shocking.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 4–5
Competing diagnoses (floating kidney, appendix); Ivan Ilyich reads medical books and becomes absorbed in his symptoms.
- The Early Christian Creeds, Athanasian Creed, opening and closing warnings
The creed's severe salvation clauses show how doctrinal therapy can become anxious boundary policing as well as communal reassurance.
- 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 Fall, Chapter 5
He describes trying to quiet the memory with alcohol and debauchery, and the sense of relief they gave.
- The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 2
Mortimer describes Sir Charles's mounting dread of the legend and his medical advice to spend months in London for distraction.
- The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 14
After the hound's attack Sir Henry is revived with brandy; that night the shock brings on a delirious high fever, and Mortimer later takes him round the world to recover.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter IV
Anxiety and unpleasant dreams, the dreams of patients that seem to contradict the theory, and the introduction of the censor and dream distortion.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1769 (Aetat. 60)
Conversations on the fear of death, Hume's calm, and whether the mind can be fortified against the last hour.
- The Lives of Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson, Life of Sanderson, pulpit
His fear and bashfulness, which forced him to read rather than preach his sermons.
- The Master and Margarita, Part One, Ch. 13
The Master tells Ivan of his novel's persecution, his fear, the burning of the manuscript and his flight to the clinic.
- The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1
Shylock compares his hatred of Antonio to men's involuntary aversions to a gaping pig, a cat or the bagpipe.
- The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, surveillance of Stillman
Quinn maps Stillman's walks into patterns and lets the case consume sleep, home and ordinary social reality.
- The New York Trilogy, Ghosts
Blue's assignment to watch Black becomes a closed circuit of isolation, projection and increasingly paranoid interpretation.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part One, final articles (c. Art. 45–50)
The soul's indirect power over the passions; habits that join movements of the gland to thoughts; the example of training animals; the claim that no soul is so weak that it cannot acquire mastery.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part Two (c. Art. 112–135)
External signs of the passions: changes of colour, trembling, languor, fainting, laughter, tears, groans and sighs, each explained by the motion of blood and spirits.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part Two (c. Art. 136)
Strange aversions in some people, such as an inability to bear the smell of roses or the presence of a cat, explained by impressions received in infancy.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, A Telephone Call
The unnamed speaker's waiting becomes a loop of bargaining, self-reproach and anxious dependence.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, The Lovely Leave
A wartime reunion compresses longing, resentment, panic and bodily expectation into a brief domestic interval.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Rome marriage chapters
Isabel's life with Osmond is marked by constriction, watchfulness and psychological coercion rather than overt physical violence.
- The Practice of the Presence of God, Second Conversation
Four years of conviction that he would be damned, resolved by choosing to love God whatever became of him.
- The Prince, Chapters XVII and XIX
Analysis of fear, love, hatred and contempt as the emotional forces that hold or dissolve a state; a ruler should be feared without being hated.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter XI: Attention
The definition of attention and its opposite, the dazed scatter-brained state of distraction; discussion of effort and fatigue.
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Part Two, Ch. 4
The doctrine of predestination, the believer's isolation, and the search for signs of election.
- The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, The Thorn in the Flesh
Bachmann's vertigo on the scaling ladder and his loss of bladder control before the company.
- The Red Badge of Courage, Chapter I
Henry lies awake in his hut calculating whether he will run, an extended portrait of anticipatory anxiety before a first battle.
- The Red Badge of Courage, Chapter VI
Henry's flight: he sees others running, drops his rifle and runs blindly to the rear before he has decided anything.
- The Screwtape Letters, Letter VI
Screwtape urges Wormwood to keep the patient in suspense and anxiety about wartime dangers that may never come, rather than in present duty.
- The Screwtape Letters, Letters XXIX-XXX
Fear, cowardice, fatigue and short temper during air raids, and Screwtape's attempts to use exhaustion against the patient.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, C (forms of the synthesis)
Despair of infinitude lost in fantasy and despair of possibility, set against fatalistic and philistine despair of necessity; descriptions often compared to grandiosity and to depressive hopelessness.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part Two, B
Despair over one's sin and of forgiveness as intensifications of despair, relevant to religious guilt and scrupulosity in clinical settings.
- The Story of a Soul, Chapter III
The illness of 1883 with terrors, apparent delirium and torpor, Marie's nursing, and the cure she attributes to the smile of the Virgin.
- The Story of a Soul, Chapter IV
The years of scruples after her First Communion, which she calls a terrible disease.
- The Story of My Life, Part I, Chapter XIV
The Frost King hearing and her long afterward fear that her ideas were not her own.
- The Subjection of Women, Chapter III
Nervous susceptibility as an objection to women's fitness for business; hysterics and fainting fits disappearing with fashion; the hot-house upbringing of upper-class girls.
- The Thirty-Nine Steps, Chapter VII
Bullivant describes Scudder as half crank, half genius, always frightened yet never deterred.
- The True Story of My Life, Chapter III
The harsh rector at Slagelse and Helsingør and the misery that brings him near to sinking.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, early Bly chapters
The governess's isolation, attraction to the absent employer and first apparition establish an anxious perceptual field.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, final scene
The confrontation with Miles joins possible exorcism, panic, coercion and child death.
- The Vampyre, Aubrey's return to England
Aubrey suffers fever, terror and apparent mental disorder after Ruthven returns and the oath prevents disclosure.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures VI and VII: The Sick Soul
Anhedonia, Tolstoy's crisis of meaning, Bunyan's obsessions and verbal automatisms, and the anonymous French sufferer's panic and lasting dread.
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter 12: The Dark Island
The crew enter the island where dreams come true and flee in terror; Lord Rhoop is rescued after years of living nightmares.
- The Waste Land, II. A Game of Chess, ll. 111-138
A woman's nerves are bad tonight; she begs her companion to speak, and he answers inwardly of rats' alley and dead men's bones.
- The Waste Land, III. The Fire Sermon, ll. 182 and 300
By the waters of Leman and On Margate Sands, places linked to Eliot's rest and treatment in 1921.
- The Woman in White, Second Epoch, Frederick Fairlie's narrative
Mr. Fairlie's elaborate account of his nerves and his sufferings from noise and light, interrupted by visitors he cannot refuse.
- This Side of Paradise, Book One, Ch. 1
Amory's appendix bursts on an ocean liner, the ship turns back, and after the operation Beatrice suffers a 'nervous breakdown' the narrator likens to delirium tremens; Amory is sent to Minneapolis.
- This Side of Paradise, Book One, Ch. 3 ('The Devil')
Amory's vision of a ghostly figure in a New York apartment and his flight through the streets.
- Twelve Angry Men, Opening deliberation
Heat, impatience and life-or-death stakes create a pressure environment for group decision-making.
- Understood Betsy, Chapter I, Aunt Harriet Has a Cough
Aunt Frances's nightly dream interviews, her worry over the child's nerves and appetite, the doctor's verdict that the child is sound, and his alarm at Aunt Harriet's cough.
- Understood Betsy, Chapter VII, Elizabeth Ann Fails in an Examination
The narrator lists the examination symptoms Betsy learned from Aunt Frances, and Cousin Ann's refusal to rehearse them.
- White Nights, Fourth night and morning
The dreamer's sudden hope and loss form a compact study of attachment, disappointment and depressive return.
Quotes
“I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am placed in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster”
“Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth so far, we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as to regimen: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence”
“skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain many-sided physiological temperament, which in ordinary language is called nervous debility and sickliness”
“My arteries began beating so violently that I not only felt their motion, but even heard it, particularly that of the carotids, attended by a loud noise in my ears”
“I could not read the description of any malady without thinking it mine, and, had I not been already indisposed, I am certain I should have become so from this study”
“Remorse, shame, anguish, rage, disappointment, anxiety, fear, dejection, despair; who has ever passed through life without cruel inroads from these tormentors”
Frequently cited
“Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things”
“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul”
“He says the best way out is always through.”
“MEN fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children, is increased with tales, so is the other”
“As for the passions, and studies of the mind; avoid envy, anxious fears; anger fretting inwards; subtle and knotty inquisitions; joys and exhilarations in excess; sadness not communicated”
“Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are, therefore, the true sources of Superstition.”
Frequently cited
“Love is a thing ever filled with anxious fear.”
“Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream”
“Dejection, subjects a man to causelesse fears; which is a Madnesse commonly called MELANCHOLY, apparent also in divers manners; as in haunting of solitudes, and graves; in superstitious behaviour; and in fearing some one, some another particular thing”
“And this Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition”
Frequently cited
“and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”
“Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand”
“The first qualification in a general-in-chief is a cool head--that is, a head which receives just impressions, and estimates things and objects at their real value. He must not allow himself to be elated by good news, or depressed by bad”
“Some men are so physically and morally constituted as to see everything through a highly-colored medium”
Frequently cited
“I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness—a real thorough-going illness.”
“The young soldier cannot reach any of these different strata of danger without feeling that the light of reason does not move here in the same medium, that it is not refracted in the same manner as in speculative contemplation”
“When we are well we wonder what we would do if we were ill, but when we are ill we take medicine cheerfully; the illness persuades us to do so”
Frequently cited
“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber”
“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”
“It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him”
“For I know well that ye are Sir Gawain, whom all the world worships, wheresoever ye may ride”
“My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night”
“Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!”
Frequently cited
“True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”
“The common sort define it to be a kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions, fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion”
“5) over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble”
“Soldiers when in desperate straits lose the sense of fear. If there is no place of refuge, they will stand firm”
“Sir Charles’s nervous system was strained to the breaking point.”
“So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it.”
“Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought”
“the almost total disappearance of "hysterics" and fainting fits, since they have gone out of fashion”
“I think he was the bravest man in the world, for he was always shivering with fright, and yet nothing would choke him off.”
“He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory”
“suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence”
“That shape am I_, I felt, potentially”
“I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man.”
“After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens”
“I guess Hemlock Mountain will stand right there just the same even if you did forget to put a b in ‘doubt.’”