Ann Thompson Books

The core of the ground-breaking, three text edition, this self-contained, free-standing volume gives readers the Second Quarto text (1604-5) and includes in its Introduction, notes and Appendices all the reader might expect to find in any standard Arden edition. As well as a full, illustrated Introduction to the play?s historical, cultural and performance contexts and a thorough survey of critical approaches to the play, an appendix contains the additional passages found only in the 1623 text. The core of the ground-breaking, three text edition, this self-contained, free-standing volume gives readers the Second Quarto text (1604-5) and includes in its Introduction, notes and Appendices all the reader might expect to find in any standard Arden edition. As well as a full, illustrated Introduction to the play?s historical, cultural and performance contexts and a thorough survey of critical approaches to the play, an appendix contains the additional passages found only in the 1623 text.

John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work is available both individually and as a set, and each contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary printed at the back. The edition, which began with The Tempest and ended with The Sonnets, put into practice the techniques and theories that had evolved under the 'New Bibliography'. Remarkably by today's standards, although it took the best part of half a century to produce, the New Shakespeare involved only a small band of editors besides Dover Wilson himself. As the volumes took shape, many of Dover Wilson's textual methods acquired general acceptance and became an established part of later editorial practice, for example in the Arden and New Cambridge Shakespeares.

The harrowing narrative follows Ann, who, at just two months old, enters a Catholic orphanage in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she endures severe physical and sexual abuse at the hands of both religious and lay staff. Forced into grueling labor on the orphanage farm and in laundries, her story sheds light on the dark realities of abuse within New Zealand's Catholic institutions, making it a groundbreaking account that seeks to expose and confront these painful truths.