The Story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr Milton: And, The Islands of Unwisdom

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Carcanet, 2003 - 616 pages
In these true stories, the acclaimed writer Robert Graves explores the worlds of two men intent on success. Wife to Mr. Milton is an exploration into the marriage of a man the author considered one of the heinous monsters in the English poetic pantheon--John Milton--and how his wife was ill-used by him. Milton's first wife was 16 when they married, and Milton was after her dowry. When it did not follow he proved domineering and dishonest, unresponsive to her sensuousness and her down-to-earth wit. It was a spiritual misalliance, too: her Catholicism sorted ill with his beliefs. The dramatic political and military events of the English civil war touched her life at every point, including the execution of Charles I. The Isles of Unwisdom visits a different, very Catholic world, that of the expeditions of the Spanish explorers and discoverers, near contemporaries of Milton but not emancipated by the Reformation, who come unstuck in the New World. Reconstructed is the ill-fated voyage of Alvaro de Mendana y Neya to find the Solomon Islands, popularly believed to constitute the fabled Land of Ophir, where King Solomon amassed his legendary wealth.

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Table des matières

An Alarm of the Plague
16
A Sight of Their Majesties and of Another
29
The Manner of Our Life at Forest Hill
42
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À propos de l'auteur (2003)

Robert Graves (1895-1985), poet, classical scholar, novelist, and critic, was one of the gratest writers of the 20th Century. Athough he produced over 100 books he is perhaps best known for the novel I, CLAUDIUS (1934),THE WHITE GODDESS (1948) and GREEK MYTHS (1955). Robert Graves was born in Wimbledon, south London. His father, Alfred Percival Graves, was a school inspector, and his mother, Amalie von Ranke Graves, was a great-niece of the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1866). He was educated at Charterhouse, and awarded a B.Litt by St. John's College, Oxford after his return from World war I, where he served alsongside Siegfried Sassoon. Robert Graves died in 1985 in Deja, the Majorcan village he had made his home (with the exception of the Spanish civil war and the Second World War) since 1929.

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