Author | Saki |
---|---|
Published | 1912 |
Publisher | John Lane |
Preceded by | The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) |
Followed by | When William Came (1913) |
The Unbearable Bassington is a novel by the British author Saki (the pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro) published in 1912. [1]
Set almost entirely in the capital city, the novel focuses on the Mayfair social scene of bridge, dinner parties, concerts, and the sporting events of the season.
At the beginning of the book, the anti-hero, Comus Bassington, a "beautiful wayward laughing boy", the spoilt only child of Francesca Bassington, a rich and fashionable widow, is in his last year at school, where he is a sadistic prefect. After he ends his school career, he lives with his mother and joins a group of bores and savage society wits. [1]
Without a career or a fortune of his own, Bassington hopes to marry Elaine de Frey, a rich young heiress, facing competition from his friend Courtney Youghal, a rising politician. Of the two, Elaine prefers Comus, but she is put off by his habit of borrowing money from her and his carelessness towards her. When her engagement to Youghal is announced, Francesca is angry with her son, blaming him for losing his one chance of financial security. On the advice of his uncle Henry Greech, he is sent away to take up a job in West Africa, where he soon dies. [1]
The novel was seen as a success and was one of the works recommended to readers by Frank Swinnerton in his revision of Arnold Bennett's Literary Taste: How to Form It (1937).
Hector Hugh Munro, popularly known by his pen name Saki and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered by English teachers and scholars a master of the short story and is often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, Munro himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse.
Youghal is a seaside resort town in County Cork, Ireland. Located on the estuary of the River Blackwater, the town is a former military and economic centre. Located on the edge of a steep riverbank, the town has a long and narrow layout. As of the 2022 census, the population was 8,564. The town is in a civil parish of the same name.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a 1984 novel by Milan Kundera, about two women, two men, a dog, and their lives in the 1968 Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history. Although written in 1982, the novel was not published until two years later, in a French translation. The same year, it was translated to English from Czech by Michael Henry Heim and excerpts of it were published in The New Yorker. The original Czech text was published the following year.
In Greek mythology, Comus or Komus is the god of festivity, revels, and nocturnal dalliances.
The Inimitable Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse was the first of the Jeeves novels, although not originally conceived as a single narrative, being assembled from a number of short stories featuring the same characters. The book was first published in the United Kingdom by Herbert Jenkins, London, on 17 May 1923 and in the United States by George H. Doran, New York, on 28 September 1923, under the title Jeeves.
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Why Didn't They Ask Evans? is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie, first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club in September 1934 and in the United States by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1935 under the title of The Boomerang Clue. The UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6) and the US edition at $2.00.
John Carey is a British literary critic, and post-retirement (2002) emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He is known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expounded in several books. He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2003, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005.
When William Came: A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns is a novel written by the British author Saki and published in November 1913. It is set several years in what was then the future, after a war between Germany and Great Britain in which the former won.
Hollywood Wives is a 1983 novel by the British author Jackie Collins. It was her ninth novel, and her most successful, selling over 15 million copies.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a 1988 American romantic drama film, an adaptation of the 1984 novel by Milan Kundera. It was directed by Philip Kaufman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrière, and stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin. The film portrays Czechoslovak artistic and intellectual life during the Prague Spring, and the effect on the main characters of the communist repression that resulted from the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Alexander Munro was a British sculptor of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. He concentrated on portraiture and statues, but is best known for his Rossetti-influenced figure-group Paolo and Francesca (1852), which has often been identified as the epitome of Pre-Raphaelite sculpture.
Comus is a masque in three acts adapted from John Milton's masque of the same name by John Dalton in 1738. The music there was set by Thomas Arne and helped establish the composer's reputation.
Jackie Collins' Hollywood Wives is an American television miniseries based on the 1983 novel of the same name by Jackie Collins. Airing on ABC in February 1985, it follows several women connected to the entertainment industry in Hollywood and capitalized on the public's taste for opulent melodramas that dominated television ratings in the 1980s. The three-part, four-and-a-half-hour production was produced by Aaron Spelling, whose series Dynasty was number one in the ratings at the time. Like Dynasty, costume design was by Nolan Miller.
Arthur John Langguth was an American author, journalist and educator, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was professor of the Annenberg School for Communications School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. Langguth was the author of several dark, satirical novels, a biography of the English short story master Saki, and lively histories of the Trail of Tears, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, Afro-Brazilian religion in Brazil and the United States, the Vietnam War, the political life of Julius Caesar and U.S. involvement with torture in Latin America. A graduate of Harvard College, Langguth was South East Asian correspondent and Saigon bureau chief for The New York Times during the Vietnam War, using the byline "Jack Langguth". He also wrote and reported for Look Magazine in Washington, DC and The Valley Times in Los Angeles, California. Langguth joined the journalism faculty at USC in 1976. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976, and received the Freedom Forum Award, honoring the nation's top journalism educators, in 2001. He retired from active teaching at USC in 2003.
Half Girlfriend is an Indian English coming of age, young adult romance novel by Indian author Chetan Bhagat. The novel, set in rural Bihar, New Delhi, Patna, and New York, is the story of a Bihari boy on a quest of winning over the girl he loves. This is Bhagat's sixth novel, which was released on 1 October 2014 by Rupa Publications. The novel has also been published in Hindi and Gujarati.
Francesca Coppa is an American scholar whose research has encompassed British drama, performance studies and fan studies. In English literature, she is known for her work on the British writer Joe Orton; she edited several of his early novels and plays for their first publication in 1998–99, more than thirty years after his murder, and compiled an essay collection, Joe Orton: A Casebook (2003). She has also published on Oscar Wilde. In the fan-studies field, Coppa is known for documenting the history of media fandom and, in particular, of fanvids, a type of fan-made video. She co-founded the Organization for Transformative Works in 2007, originated the idea of interpreting fan fiction as performance, and in 2017, published the first collection of fan fiction designed for teaching purposes. As of 2021, Coppa is a professor of English at Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania.
The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) by Saki, the pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro, is the author's third volume of short stories, 28 in number, the majority of which had earlier appeared in various newspapers and magazines. Witty, socially satirical, and sometimes chilling, they narrate the exploits of Clovis Sangrail, Bertie van Tahn and other privileged characters in Edwardian England. The collection is acknowledged to contain some of his best and most popular stories.
"Tobermory" is a humorous short story by Hector Hugh Munro written under his pen-name, Saki. It was originally published in The Westminster Gazette in 1909, first collected, in a revised form, in The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), and has frequently been reprinted in anthologies.