Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most open to change. She lives at the time of the Napoleonic wars, a time of accident, adventure, the making of new fortunes and alliances.
Jane Austen's brilliant satire of the gothic novel. “If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.” The most sprightly and satirical of Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey was written when the author was herself in her early twenties, and takes for its heroine seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, a spirited young woman preoccupied with the pleasures of dressing, dancing, and reading sensational novels. When she visits Northanger Abbey, the ancestral home of handsome Henry Tilney, Catherine’s taste in books comes back to haunt her. The rambling house, full of locked doors, and the family’s mysterious history give rise to delightfully dreadful suspicions, and finally only Catherine’s sweet nature and good humor triumph over her susceptibility. A sly commentary on the power of literature as well as a cautionary tale about the perils of naïveté, Northanger Abbey is a fresh and funny tale of one young woman receiving, as Margaret Drabble reveals in her illuminating introduction, “intensive instruction in the ways of the world.” With an Introduction by Margaret Drabble and an Afterword by Stephanie Laurens
This book accompanies an exhibition, The Nakeds, which is devoted to drawings of the body exposed. The naked body is frequently the physical terrain artists traverse in search of psychological truth. How to represent love, shame, solitude and sexual yearning?Drawing from the self or life model, from reproduction or the imagination, has provided artists with the freedom to explore desires, fears and fantasies. The Nakeds takes as its starting point selected drawings of the single figure by Egon Schiele. From here, it considers work by artists from the post-war period to the present day.Essays by the co-curators, artist David Austen and art historian Dr. Gemma Blackshaw, will investigate Schiele's drawings of the single figure, the contested issue of art and pornography in Vienna around 1900, Schiele as seen through the lens of contemporary female artists, the role of photography and of memory in the realisation of drawings, and a consideration of the artists' choice of media.Artist Nicola Tyson contributes Dear Egon Schiele, a new letter in her published series of letters to dead artists.The Nakeds, exhibition takes place between, 25 September 2014 - 29 November 2014, at Drawing Room, Tannery Arts, London.Inside image caption: George Condo, Couple, 2007. Pencil on paper, 45.1 x 43.1 cm. Courtesy Simon Lee Gallery, London, Private collection UK.