The Romance of Morien

"Few documents portray the ethnicity of the Moors in medieval Europe with more passion, boldness and clarity than the epic of Morien...He first challenges, then battles, and finally wins the unqualified respect and admiration of Sir Lancelot...Ultimately, and ironically, Sir Morien came to personify all of the finest virtues of the knights of the European Middle Ages." - from "Nature Knows No Color-Line" , By J.A. Rogers


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Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

"It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end [...] Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance a those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent."— Musings upon the Big/Little end heresy, Gulliver's Travels

"One of the precursors of Speculative Fiction, [Gulliver's Travels], was written by Jonathan Swift as a parody of the now-dead genre of traveller's tale, satirising 18th century follies, but is now, sadly, largely remembered as a children's tale, despite being Swift'sMagnum Opus and a heavily satirical and adult book."- Tv Tropes

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Pelle the Conqueror by Martin Andersen Nexø

"The great charm of the book seems to me to lie in the fact that the writer knows the poor from within; he has not studied them as an outsider may, but has lived with them and felt with them, at once a participant and a keen-eyed spectator... His sympathy is of the widest, and he makes us see tragedies behind the little comedies, and comedies behind the little tragedies, of the seemingly sordid lives of the working people whom he loves." - Otto Jespersen, Introductory note to English translation (1913)



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A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

"If nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full."

"The word PRINCESS doesn't mean what it used to and I want to reclaim the meaning of this word from the pink swathed, tiara wearing, big eyed, marketing manufactured princesses now captivating the minds of most little girls under the age of eight."- books4yourkids review

"I loved it because at its heart this is a story about one of my very favourite themes: the power of stories and the imagination. It’s a story about how they help make us more compassionate by stepping into the shoes of fictional others, how they save us, how they can be a refuge, and how they give us hope."  - Things Mean a Lot review


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Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley

To a LADY on her remarkable Preservation
in an Hurricane in North-Carolina.

THOUGH thou did'st hear the tempest from afar,
And felt'st the horrors of the wat'ry war,
To me unknown, yet on this peaceful shore
Methinks I hear the storm tumultuous roar,
And how stern Boreas with impetuous hand
Compell'd the Nereids to usurp the land.
Reluctant rose the daughters of the main,
And slow ascending glided o'er the plain,
Till AEolus in his rapid chariot drove
In gloomy grandeur from the vault above:
Furious he comes. His winged sons obey
Their frantic sire, and madden all the sea.
The billows rave, the wind's fierce tyrant roars,
And with his thund'ring terrors shakes the shores:
Broken by waves the vessel's frame is rent,
And strows with planks the wat'ry element.
But thee, Maria, a kind Nereid's shield
Preserv'd from sinking, and thy form upheld:
And sure some heav'nly oracle design'd
At that dread crisis to instruct thy mind
Things of eternal consequence to weigh,
And to thine heart just feelings to convey
Of things above, and of the future doom,
And what the births of the dread world to come.
From tossing seas I welcome thee to land.
"Resign her, Nereid," 'twas thy God's command.
Thy spouse late buried, as thy fears conceiv'd,
Again returns, thy fears are all reliev'd:
Thy daughter blooming with superior grace
Again thou see'st, again thine arms embrace;
O come, and joyful show thy spouse his heir,
And what the blessings of maternal care!



Biography of Phillis Wheatly


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The Way of an Eagle by Ethel M. Dell

"And, sure, it’s not feminist literature or anything, but I found it charming, in a disturbing kind of way, and I’m sorry I put it off for so long. Yes, there’s a helpless, slightly dithery young woman, but she’s only helpless and dithery in fairly trying situations. Other times, she likes to play hockey. And yes, the hero is powerful and commanding and all that, but he also looks like a monkey and is slightly insane (Dell repeatedly describes him as looking like a monkey. The insanity I figured out on my own.)" - Redeeming Qualities review


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Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser

The novel is referenced by  Harvey Pekar in the film American Splendor (2003).

"In a 1911 review, H. L. Mencken wrote, "Jennie Gerhardt is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn." Beautiful, vital, generous, but morally naïve and unconscious of social conventions, Jennie is a working-class woman who emerges superior to the succession of men who exploit her. There are no villains in this novel; in Dreiser's view, everyone is victimized by the desires that the world excites but can never satisfy." - The Library of America

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