Fireworks, by Graham Swift

Fireworks

This story deals with the feelings of a father when his only daughter is about getting married. Bur two weeks before the appointed wedding, there is the famous missile crisis. Are they going to celebrate the wedding, or they prefer waiting for the end of the world? A few days after, it’s the 5th of November, Guy Fawkes Day, but now the celebration will be a bit different and perhaps not so happy as in previous years.

QUESTIONS

-What do you know of the crisis of the missiles in Cuba?

-How do you think the world will end? Do you think it’s going to be and end for the humanity? What is, according to your opinion, the best literary end of the world?

-Is Monday the worst day of the week, or it is a cliché? Do you have a favourite day? And a day you hate? Do you know the origin of the prejudice against Fridays (in Anglo-Saxon countries) or Tuesdays (as for example in Spain)?

-About news: Why are they all the time negative? Is there a secret objective? Or is it simply because people don’t like good news?

-Can you see an analogy between the pair of presidents and the pair of fathers-in-law?

-Do you keep old clothes or do you prefer donating them? Is there any piece that you love specially and want to keep it forever?

-What do you know about Guy Fawkes Day? And about Guy Fawkes?

-Is there an analogy between Guy Fawkes Day and a wedding?

-There had been a worldly alarm of a nuclear explosion, and at the end there were only fireworks. Do you think the author wanted to mean something with this?

-What was your experience with weddings? Have you been in a very unusual wedding?

 

VOCABULARY

flippant, distraught, forked out, crackling, tantrum, chucking it down, glued, aimer, get into flaps, grizzling, fixture, thrill, regalia, give it a miss, foible, slouching, juddering, rant, plonked, Bovril, debriefings, swig

England and Other Stories, by Graham Swift

Graham Swift FRSL (Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature) was born in 1949 in London, England. He was educated at Cambridge, and later the University of York.

One of his most important works is Waterland (1992), which was adapted as a film, starring Jeremy Irons and Ethan Hawke, directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal (father of the actor Jake Gyllenhaal and of the actress Maggie Gyllenhaal).  It’s the story about a teacher in a secondary school, and it’s situated in the Fens, a marshy region in the east of England. The teacher, a tormented person because he feels guilty of a sad incident, teaches history and mixes his lessons with the history of his family.

Another novel that has also adapted as a film is Last Orders (1996), starring Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins and Hellen Mirren. It’s about a group of friends who have to scatter the ashes of a deceased friend in the sea. The story goes backwards and forwards, this way remembering the old days of their dead friend. The novel got the Booker Prize in 1996 and this was a cause of controversy because of its similarities with the novel As I lay Dying, by Faulkner. The title of Swift novel alludes to the will of a defunct and also to the phrase said by the bartenders at 22:55 to prompt the patrons to order one last drink, because at 23:00 the pub will be closed.

He wrote several novels more, and also two collections of short stories: Learning to Swim and England and Other Stories.

Swift is more an English than a world writer, because he writes mostly about English subjects and situates his stories in British soil. The events (murder, adultery…) of his novels are treated with decorum, in an almost puritanic fashion. We can use the saying “Still waters run deep” for his narratives: at first sight all is calm, but the tragedy is underneath. His characters are “typical British”, phlegmatic people.

Technically, Swift does not innovate. His novels are mostly conventional. And that means he is understandable to everyone. But his novels are full of mystery: you don’t know the reasons why the people act and react, and these reasons will be revealed only gradually. In this case, sometimes you think that the author is playing with you: if he knows the solution, why doesn’t he tell us about it from the beginning?

 

About him:

He went to live in Greece for a year with the purpose of becoming a writer, and he went back to England with a horrid (according to him) manuscript.

He was influenced by Isaac Babel when he was younger, and kept a photograph of the Russian writer on his desk.

 

About himself:

“I believe it would be a bad day for a writer if he could say, “I know exactly what I'm doing”.”

“I hope my imagination will always surprise and stretch me and take me along unsuspected paths.”

“When you're reading a book, you're on a little island.”

 

About England and Other Stories

“All these stories are bits of England, but they are bits of different Englands.”

His short stories are an affectionate chronicle of everyday lives.

A calculated ordinariness unites the protagonists in Graham Swift’s new collection of short stories.

In most of the stories, ‘Englishness’ has a less concrete nature, a bittersweet quality.

This is a sharp, beautiful collection: every story quick and readable but leaving in the memory a core, a residue, of thoughtfulness. Some are wicked, some are funny.

Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend, by P. D. Wodehouse

P. D. Wodehouse at the Wikipedia

Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend, at the Wikipedia

Video

Radio adaptation (from 1:50:00 to 2:15:00)

P. D. Wodehouse, by Begoña Devis

BIOGRAPHY 

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born on the 15^th of October 1881, in Guildford (UK). He was the son of Eleanor Deane, from a landed family, and Henry Ernest Wodehouse. The Wodehouse had been based in Norfolk for many centuries. His lineage is ancient, going back to as far back as 1227, when Sir Bertram of Wodehouse fought with Eduard I against the Scots.
He was a prolific writer, author of more than 90 narrative books (70 novels and 20 collections with a total of 200 stories), another hundred short stories in magazines, 400 articles, 19 plays and 250 song lyrics for 33 musicals of Broadway as well as adaptations and screenplays.
Until the age of two, he lived in Hong Kong, where his father was a British government judge. Back in London, he grew up with his two older brothers practically as am orphan, under different family guardianships, especially aunts, since his parents continued to reside in Hong Kong until he was 15 years old. That’s reflected in his abundant production: in his work there are no mothers but aunts, and there are also few fathers and their relationship with their children are scarce and comical. On the other hand, his biographer revealed that, as a young man, he pretended to be almost mentally retarded, when in reality he has intelligent, complex and educated. Thanks to that false naive disguise, he was able to concentrate on what he really liked: writing.
Having studied at Dulwich College, his first paid paper was “Aspects of Game Captaincy”. He was unable to follow his brother to Oxford because the family finances began to have difficulties. So, instead of a university degree, in September 1900, he reluctantly took a job at the London office of the Bank of Hong Kong and Shanghai. To disassociate himself from this job that he did not like at all, he began to write about sports and humorous stories in the press and magazines. As a great sportsman, he represented Dulwich College in boxing, cricked and rugby, sports which, along with golf, figure directly or indirectly in many of his stories.
Although he had already visited New York in 1904, it was during another visit in 1909 that Wodehouse sold “two short stories to Cosmopolitan and Collier’s magazines for a total sum of $500, much more than he had ever made”. That decided him to leave the United Kingdom and settle in New York. In 1914, he married Ethel Newton, a widow he had met in New York two months earlier and whose daughter, Leonora, he adopted.
The following year, he was hired as a theatre critic by Vanity Fair magazine. By this time, his first novels had met with some success, and, from 1909, Wodehouse was living between Paris and the United States. His reputation as a humorous novelist was established with his work Psmith in the City. He maintained his enormous popularity through almost a hundred novels, in which a series of curious and very British characters were almost always idle young people disoriented by the absurd and comical situations. In 1919, he begins what will be his most famous series of novels and stories, with My Man Jeeves. This character, a shrewd valet who always rescues the reckless Mr Bertie Wooster, who almost always is the victim of some conspiracy by his aunt.
In 1934, Wodehouse, already very successful as a writer, and to avoid double taxation on his income, moved to live in France. With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, instead of returning to the UK, he decided to stay in his house on the coast at Le Touquet. In the summer of that year, Wodehouse had gone to Oxford to be made an honorary doctor, and shortly after his return to Le Touquet. The German authorities interned him, in his late sixties, as an “enemy alien”, first in Belgium, then in Upper Silesia (now in Poland). After that, the British government, despite having a report by a senior M15 exonerating him of treason (which was not published until after his death), denounced him as a Nazi collaborator, and the media continued to accuse him of being a traitor for a long time, and some public libraries banned his books, and even some prominent authors criticized him harshly. Wodehouse, disgusted by the treatment received by his country, never returned to the United Kingdom, and in 1955 he obtained American citizenship.
PG Wodehouse is considered one of the best English humourists alongside Jerome K. Jerome, Evelyn Waugh and Tom Sharpe. An edition of his complete works is practically impossible, since in more than seventy years of constant literary work (from 1902 to1975) Wodehouse did not let a day go by without writing something. 
In the year of his death, the great Wodehouse was made Sir. He died in Remsenburg, Long Island (United States) on the 14^th of February 1975. He was 93 years old.

Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend 

Despite glorious weather, Lord Emsworth is miserable; it is August Bank Holiday, which means the annual Blandings Parva School Treat. The precious grounds are to be overrun with fairground rides, tea-tents and other amusements for the throngs, and Emsworth is will be forced by his sister Constance to wear a stiff collar and a top hat, despite the warm weather and his strong protests.
On top of that, Head Gardener Angus McAllister is determined to carry out his project of putting gravel in the garden. Emsworth, who loves his mossy carpet, loathes the idea, but his sister is in favour, and the stronger personalities overpower the elderly man.
After that, while visiting Blandings Parva to judge the flower displays, Emsworth is frightened by a large dog, but he is rescued by a small girl named Gladys. They chat and become friends, especially when she reveals that, having been seen picking flowers in the Castle grounds, she hit McAllister in the shin with a stone to stop him chasing her.
When the fête begins, Emsworth is uncomfortable as ever in his formal clothes, and he’s worried about the speech he will have to make. In addition, at the tea-tent, his top hat is knocked off by a cleverly aimed rock cake, and Emsworth flees, taking refuge in an old shed. In there, he finds Gladys, miserable; she has been put there by his sister Constance, for stealing from the tea tent something to take to her brother Ern, barred from the fête for biting Constance on the leg.
Delighted by this family, Emsworth takes Gladys into the house, and provides her a hearty tea, and also a feast to take back to Ern.  Gladys requests to pick some flowers to take home too. Emsworth hesitates, but cannot refuse her. As she is picking flowers, McAllister rushes up in a fury, but his master, encouraged by Gladys’s hand in his, stands up to the man, saying that the flowers belong to him, and that he also doesn’t want gravel in the garden, putting him in his place.
Constance approaches then, demanding Emsworth return to make his speech, but he refuses, saying he's going to put on some comfortable clothes and to visit Ern with his friend Gladys.
In my opinion is a really naive story, with sense of humour and ridiculous situations, as in almost always stories of the writer happen. In that story, the powerful aristocrat behaves like a boy, under the strict supervision of his sister (who could very well be his aunt), while his saviour is a little girl. Thanks to her, he finds the courage to do and say what he really wants.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the main characters

-Lord Emsworth

-Lady Constant Keeble

-Angus McAllister

-Gladys

-Ern

-Beach

What happens in August Bank Holiday?

Tell us about the gravel path.

What opinion does Lord Emsworth have about Scottish people?

Why does Angus have the upper hand with Lord Emsworth?

Can you explain the scene with the dog?

What are Lord Emsworth’s resources as to deal with people of the other sex?

What is the meaning of “season” for a “classical lord”?

What kind of relationships does Lord Emsworth have with women?

Talk about Lord Emsworth’s Panama hat.

What was the problem with his collar?

What is the reference for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego?

According to Lord Emsworth, what are the characteristics of a London child?

Why Gladys and her brother were excluded from the garden party?

What do you know about the Battle of Bannonckburn?

When did Lord Emsworth feel like a true lord again?

“Better to cease to be a Napoleon than be a Napoleon in exile.” What do you think of this proverb?

 

VOCABULARY

summer morning, beaming, kippered, marquees, potter, evenfall, dodge, dodder, hemlock, peers, filling station, blistering, clutches, kink, number twelve heel, flout, demeanour, confidence trick, wizened, velveteen, pick, tenantry, ‘ahse, josser, plice, arf, sharted, ‘air-oil, todiy, stror, rummage-sale, ballyragged, Jno., gave at the knees, squeaker, cut both ways, rig-out, dickens, Saturnalia, goggling, vouchsafed, tough egg, curate, back-chat, squint, tumbril, slicer, dooce, shirk, lidy, gorn, Gad, pliying, dorg, fit, spineless, excursions

The Three Horsemen, by G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton at the Wikipedia

Review

The Paradoxes of Mr Pond at the Wikipedia

Audiobook (part 1. From minute 3)

Audiobook (part 2. From minute 3)

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, by Lídia Gàllego

 

BIOGRAPHY

 

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in Campden Hill in Kensington in 1874. He was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. He has been referred to as the “prince of paradox”. He wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4,000 essays (mostly newspaper columns), and several plays. He created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown and its writings consistently displayed wit and a sense of humour.

Chesterton was a large man, standing 1.93 m tall and weighing around 130 kg, who became fascinated with the occult and, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards. He was educated at St Paul’s School, then attended the Slade School of Art to become an illustrator. Chesterton also took classes in literature at University College London, but did not complete a degree in either subject. He declared himself agnostic in matters of religion.

He married Frances Blogg in 1901. Chesterton allowed Frances to lead him back to Anglicanism, though he later considered Anglicanism to be a “pale imitation” of Catholicism. He entered full communion with the Roman Catholic Church in 1922. The couple never had children.

In September 1895, Chesterton began working for the London publisher George Redway. One year later, he moved to the publishing house T. Fisher Unwin, where he remained until 1902. During this period, he also undertook his first journalistic work, as a freelance art and literary critic. Early on, Chesterton showed a great interest in and talent for art. He had planned to become an artist, and his writings show a vision that clothed abstract ideas in concrete and memorable images.

Chesterton was part of the Detection Club, a society of British mystery authors founded by Anthony Berkeley in 1928. He was elected as the first president and served from 1930 to 1936.

Chesterton died of congestive heart failure on the14th June 1936, aged 62. Near the end of Chesterton’s life, Pope Pius XI invested him as Knight Commander with Star of the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great. The Chesterton Society proposed his beatification.

 

The Three Horsemen

Mr. Pond, a government official and old friend of the author’s father, explains, in a meeting between acquaintances, a case he had to solve a few years ago: Marshal Von Grock, who leads a regiment of Prussian hussars in occupied Poland, considers that Paul Petrowski, a Polish poet and singer, must be executed because his public demonstrations of patriotism are a danger. For this reason and considering that the poet is about to be released, he sends a messenger, Lieutenant Von Hocheimer, with precise orders for his execution shortly before the arrival of the Prince. The Prince knows that this act would have international repercussions, would make Petrowski a martyr and would cause them a lot of trouble, so he decides to send a messenger with a pardon to stop the marshal’s order. Nevertheless, the marshal remains convinced that Petrowski must die for the safety of the Prince and the homeland, so he secretly sends a third messenger, Sergeant Schwartz, to prevent the pardon from arriving. Eventually, no messenger will arrive, and the poet Petrowski will be released. Mr. Pond tells his acquaintances why he thinks it happened so.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters:

-Mr Pond

-Paul Petrowsky. Why is he dangerous (for the Prussians)?

-Marshal Von Grock: physical appearance and personality.

-Lieutenant Von Hocheimer

-His Highness

-Arnold Von Schacht

-Sergeant Schwartz. Why did Grock choose him for the mission?

What is a paradox? Can you give some examples?

What in life is a lot but never too much? Why?

The narrator say that Captain Gahagan seems to belong to a past when being a duellist was more common. What duels in fiction do you remember the best?

“It was his one compliment to poetry.” What do we have to understand by this sentence?

Grock says they must serve (different from obey) His Highness? What does it imply?

What do you know about the Ems telegram (or dispatch)? So when do you think the story is situated?

What is the meaning of this sentence: “Death is the fact of all facts”?

What is the relation between Goethe and Weimar?

“The world is changed not by what is said, but by what is done”, said Grock. Do you agree? Why?

Why does the narrator use this image: “The sergeant felt vaguely the presence of some primordial slime the was neither solid nor liquid nor capable of any form”?

What do you know about Rops?

What does that mean: “an act is unanswerable even when it is indefensible”?

 

VOCABULARY

creepy, dapper, random, owlishly, abreast, couriers, laid waste, wilderness, spick and span, baldric, reprieve, asinine, scoff, thwarts, chargers, Fatherland, overriding, orderly, marksmanship, scum, etcher

The Fall of the Idol, by Richmal Crompton

 

Richmal Crompton at the Wikipedia

Audiobook

Videos

RICHMAL CROMPTON, by Josep Guiteres

BIOGRAPHY

She was born in Bury, Lancashire in 1890, and died in 1969. She was an English writer, specialized in children’s books and horror stories.

She was the second child of Edward John Sewell, a protestant pastor and parochial school teacher, and his wife Clara; her older brother John Battersby was also a writer under the pseudonym John Lambourne.

Richmal Crompton attended St Elphin’s school and won a scholarship to classical studies at Royal Holloway College London, where she graduated Bachelor of Arts, and, in 1914, returned to teach classical authors at St. Elphin’s until 1917. Then, when she was 27 years old, went to Bromley High School in South London, teaching the same subject until 1923. Having contracted polio, she lost the use of her right leg. In 1923 and from then on, she spent her free time to write.

In 1924, she created her famous character William Brown, the protagonist of thirty-eight books of children’s stories in the naughty William saga that she wrote until her death.

She is also the author of a collection of stories about ghosts, the horror novel Dread Dwelling, in 1926, and Bruma, in 1928. As a writer of horror stories, she is eminent.

She never married and had no children; she was an aunt and a great-aunt.

 

THE FALL OF THE IDOL

The Fall of the Idol corresponds to chapter 4 of Just William with her famous eleven-years-old character William Brown.

In this chapter the writer tells us the adventures of William narrating his falling in love with his teacher, Miss Drew.

William, as a good student, sat in the back row. Being in love, he changed his seat to one in the front row. While the teacher explains the lesson, William has his fantasies with the teacher, but she constantly asks him questions about what she explains, and so he is forced to study.

Every day the teacher arrived at class, she used to find some small detail on the table of some admirer, but that morning the table and the chair were full of greenhouse flowers, evidently left by the lover. When William got home, he found his sister and two policemen who were looking for the flower thief.

The next day, Miss Drew was talking to another teacher. William, who was nearby, understood that Miss Drew liked lilacs; so, William got lilacs by stealing them from the window of a house with the subsequent uproar of the owner.

When Miss Drew entered the classroom, she said: “William, I hate lilacs”. Disappointed, his love vanished, and, as a good student, he sat again in the background.

My opinion: I liked this story because it is simple, short, entertaining and written with the fabulous typical English humour.

QUESTIONS 

Talk about your school days: were they happy or boring?

What is your opinion of this saying: “Teach anything at school and, funny it may be, at once it becomes boring”? (Remember the example of sexual education in the film by Monty Phyton “The Meaning of Life”.)

William caught a lizard and kept it in his pocket during the class. Do you have an anecdote to explain about your school days?

What happened to William’s lizard?

Who is the “malicious blind god”?

William starts giving presents to his teacher. What is your opinion about giving presents to your teacher… or to anybody?

What things you don’t do by halves? Do you always finish the book you are reading or the film you are watching?

Could William be married by the Pope? Why?

What do you think of helping your children with their homework?

“He hugged his chains”: what does it mean? Can you give more examples?

What do you imagine William wanted to do with the pipe in the garden?

Can you describe a “guelder rose” and a syringe”?

Explain the adventure of the syringe.

What is the meaning of “the idol has feet of clay”?

What do you think William felt like at the end: angry, happy, or disappointed?

 

VOCABULARY

figures, mug, 3 ½ d, mouth organ, putty, obliging, blood-curdling, outshine, hothouse, riot, soulfully, nonplussed, hubbub, conservatory, week’s mending, babbling, leading article, beaming, ole, ornery, rent, jarred, literal

A Bit of Singing and Dancing, by Susan Hill

Susan Hill at the Wikipedia

Susan Hill at the British Council

Susan Hill's website

A Bit of Singing and Dancing, analysis

A Bit of Singing and Dancing, summary

The Woman in Black, film

BIOGRAPHY

She was born in 1942 in Scarborough, a tourist resort on the East coast in the North of England, where we have to suppose our story is situated. When she was sixteen, her family moved to Coventry, where her father worked in a car factory.

He got a degree of English at the King's College in London.

She got married; her husband died, and she got married again, and they went to live in Stratford-upon-Avon. She had two daughters. Later, she left him and went to live with a Barbara Machin.

She founded her own publishing company.

She wrote mainly ghost stories, as The Woman in Black, (adapted as a play and still on the stage in London) and crime novels, but also stories like the one we’re reading, or, for example, a novel set in the WWI, Strange Meeting, or Mrs de Winter (1999), a sequel to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. She explores the childhood cruelty in the short story The Badness Within Him, and in the novel The King of the Castle (it won the Somerset Maughan Award). She has edited several anthologies of short stories, including two volumes of The Penguin Book of Modern Women's Short Stories.

Hill's prose flirts at times with a romantic image of an aristocratic England and a sentimental vision of the country before (or during) the war and imperial decline.

SUMMARY

Esme is a 5o year old woman who, as an only daughter, has had to take care during eleven years of her bedridden mother. Now her mother is dead, and a free future, open to all sort of possibilities, lays open in front of her. Nevertheless, her mother’s voice recurrently goes on admonishing her inside her head. But one day, a curious stranger comes to her door looking for a room to rent, although she had not even though about it. Of a sudden, she decides to rent him her mother’s room. Are they going to get on well? Would he be a trustworthy guest?

QUESTIONS

Do a bit of research and tell us what kind of TV programmes were “Morecombe and Wise” and “Black and White minstrels”. And who was Doctor Crippen (10, 11)?

What TV programmes used to see the old generation. And the new? Do young people watch TV?

How long are people in mourning? What do people do to show they are mourning (e.g. clothes)?

“An argument sharpen the mind”. What does this saying imply? Who were the sophists?

Talking about the will: what is your opinion about the government’s taxes on properties given in a will?

We usually see British or American funerals in movies. What are the differences between these and the funerals we celebrate here?

“You will feel the real shock later.” What do you think is the reason for this?

Esme tends to do the same things her mother did, although she hated these things in  her mother. Did you find yourself in a similar situation, and if you did, what do you think it’s the cause?

Why “Park Close could be a “comfortable” address?

In the story, there is a blatant ellipsis: the moment before Mr Curry holds a pickle with his fork. Can you explain what happened in this ellipsis?

“To stay young, you have to be constantly surprised.” How can one be constantly surprised?

Where is Mr Curry from? How do you know?

What is the meaning of “sound of wind and limb”?

“I am the kind of person who needs to give service.” Is an altruist person better than an egoist one? Don’t they do what they do for their own pleasure? What do you think about this?

“One is never old to learn, Mr Curry” What can people learn when they are old?

The story has an ending, but I think it could go on. Can you imagine a new ending?

VOCABULARY

shingle, banked-up, pipes, gale, sleet, pinched, scones, indulge, news items, bedridden, gulls, outing, will, extravagance, giddy, twilight, crawling, crooners, jabbed, runner, hoard, ruthlessly, cuff links, spruce, darn, rash, untapped, bulky, trimmed, loft, thatch, sinewy, bereaved, seances, curtailed, gave... away, bring-and-busy sales, coffee morning, dearth, carnation, dapper, boater, charabancs, putting green, despise

Paste, by Henry James

Henry James at the Wikipedia

Paste at the Wikipedia

The Necklace, by Guy de Maupassant

La parure, film (in French)

Paste: audio presentation and audiobook

Henry James, by Carme Sanz

BIOGRAPHY

Henry James has been called the first of the great psychological realists in our time. Honoured as one of the greatest artists of the novel, he is also regarded as one of America's most influential critics and literary theorists. During the fifty years of his literary career, which spanned the period from the end of the American Civil War to the beginning of World War I, James produced a body of tales and novels that fills thirty-six volumes and an almost equal number of volumes of non-fiction prose, including travel books, autobiography, books of criticism, letters, and literary notebooks.
Henry James was born in New York City on April 15, 1843, into an affluent and socially prominent family. His father, Henry James, Sr., moved among a wide circle of intellectual leaders of the time and exposed his children to the cultural advantages of New England and, more especially, Europe; before he reached his eighteenth birthday, the younger James had lived abroad for extended periods on three separate occasions.
In 1861, he suffered an "obscure hurt", an injury to his spine that kept James from service in the Civil War; for reasons perhaps related to this injury, James never married. At the age of thirty-three, he took up residence in Europe, living first for a year in Paris and then permanently in England. He became a British subject in 1915, a year before his death.
In 1869, at the age of twenty-six, he travelled for the second time to Europe, entered the mainstream of London intellectual life, and formed friendships with leading literary figures of the time. He returned to America in 1870, went abroad again in 1872 for two more years, spent the winter of 1874-75 in New York, and finally left America in 1875, this time for good. In Europe, James could best deal with his dominant theme: the illumination of the present by "the sense of the past," the American present illuminated by the sense of the European past.
Among his most famous books we can find: The Europeans, Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady or The Bostonians.

PASTE

After the death of her aunt, the protagonist Charlotte and her cousin, her aunt’s stepson Arthur Prime, find a tin of imitation jewellery which includes a string of pearls. Charlotte is immediately fascinated with the pearls, and wonders if they could be a gift from when her aunt was an actress. Arthur disputes this and feels insulted at the thought of some gentleman other than his father giving his stepmother such a gift. Charlotte quickly apologizes and agrees that the pearls could be nothing more than paste. With Arthur’s enthusiastic approval, she keeps the jewellery in memory of her aunt.

When Charlotte returns to her governess job, her friend, Mrs. Guy, asks her if she has anything to add colour to her dress for an upcoming party. When Charlotte shows Mrs Guy the jewellery, she too becomes fascinated with the string of pearls, insisting that they are genuine. Mrs Guy wears the string to the party; and when Charlotte finds out that everyone believed that they were real, she insists that they must be returned to her cousin. Mrs Guy claims that it was Arthur's foolishness to have given away the necklace, and that Charlotte should feel no guilt in keeping it.

However, Charlotte decides to return the pearls to her cousin, who still refuses to consider the pearls real. A month later, Mrs Guy shows her a wonderful string of pearls, telling Charlotte that they are the same ones that Charlotte had inherited from her aunt. Charlotte is surprised because Arthur claimed he had shattered them, when in fact he had sold them to the store where Mrs Guy bought them.

QUESTIONS

What is the meaning of the title?

Talk about the characters:

Arthur Prime

His father (Mr Prime)

His stepmother (Mrs Prime, née Miss Bradshaw)

Charlotte

Mrs Guy

Who can be “Mrs Jarvey”? 

What’s Ivanhoe, and who was Rowena?

The necklace comes alive when Mrs Guy wears it. Do you think people can give life to things? What is your opinion of “influencers”?

The necklace was “a present from an admirer capable of going such lengths”. What is the meaning of this sentence? What does it imply?

Can you imagine how Mrs Prime got the necklace? Did she have an affair?

What do you know about the Victorian morals / puritanism?

Mrs Guy without the necklace “looked naked and plain”. To what extent do you think the way we dress make us plainer or more attractive?

According to Mrs Guy, those peals were “things of love”, “they had the white glow of it”. How can things get a soul for you / for everybody?

What is the end of the story: Mrs Guy bought the necklace in Bond Street, or she got it from Arthur? Why? How?

VOCABULARY

shrewd, brood, snubbed, shimmered, pit, hortatory, twaddle, gewgaws,
penwiper, pinchbeck, odds and ends, swelled, flaxen, filberts, pert, interment,
counted on to spice, wire, tableaux vivants, muster, garish, trappings, "rum",
give her away, revels, screw down, sickly