BiblioVault - Books about Bride

The Bride of Quietness and Other Plays

Oscar Firkins

University of Minnesota Press, 1932

The Bride of Quietness and Other Plays was first published in 1932. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Oscar Firkins’ books, posthumously published, are finding what the author, during his reclusive life, never looked for – popularity, that wide appeal which is evinced in the demand for a second edition of this book of plays and the friendly reception that has resulted in putting both his plays and the more recently published Memoirs and Letters on “bestseller” lists.John Keats, in a London twilight finds himself one wit the immortal figures of his Ode on a Grecian Urn. That timelessness of beauty to which he gave serene expression in his famous ode is the theme of The Bride of Quietness, the title play of this volume. The romantically wedded Brownings of Turnpikes in Arcady discover, under the spell of an Italian night, that they are not at all the “practical” persons they have supposed themselves to be. Charlotte, Emily, and the other enigmatic Brontës are vividly revealed in the brief, incisive lines of Empurpled Moors. A sprightly Restoration atmosphere pervades The King’s Vigil, in which Samuel Pepys and Charles II spend a night cloistered behind a massive oak door in hiding from importunate wives and mistresses.

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Bride of the Revolution

Krupskaya and Lenin

Robert H. McNeal

University of Michigan Press, 1972

Some four years after the wedding of Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov in the splendor of the Kremlin, two obscure political convicts—Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) and Nadezhda Krupskaya--were married in Siberia. Twenty years later Lenin and Krupskaya were themselves living in the Kremlin, and the royal Romanovs had been shot by Lenin's police. This book re-creates for the first time the full story of the devoted and determined woman who married the greatest among European revolutionary leaders. Krupskaya's marriage was remarkable in many ways. It began with Lenin's ambiguous proposal smuggled into her jail cell, and ended in the intrigue of succession as Lenin lay dying. From close political collaboration during the early emigrant years of the Bolshevik Party, to her role in the long-suppressed story of Lenin's affair with Inessa Armand, Krupskaya proved herself a loyal bride of the revolution. Yet Krupskaya in her own right comes alive in these pages—as a youthful Tolstoyan; as an advocate of progressive education and the liberation of women; as chief cryptologist, secretary, and paymaster for the tiny network of revolutionaries; as an ultimately tragic figure, struggling to defend her husband's legacy against the machinations of Joseph Stalin. Nadezhda Krupskaya has long been revered in Russia as the greatest woman of the Communist era, yet no Soviet writer has dared to write frankly of her fascinating and turbulent life. In this book—based on extensive research in Soviet publications as well as Tsarist and Trotskyan archive materials—the author has succeeded in unraveling many of the enigmas of Krupskaya's biography, and has provided often intimate and very human glimpses of her famous relationship with Lenin. Here, for the first time, Krupskaya at last takes her place as a great figure of the modern age.

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Butterfly, the Bride

Essays on Law, Narrative, and the Family

Carol Weisbrod

University of Michigan Press, 2004

Carol Weisbrod uses a variety of stories to raise important questions about how society, through law, defines relationships in the family. Beginning with a story most familiar from the opera Madame Butterfly, Weisbrod addresses issues such as marriage, divorce, parent-child relations and abuses, and non-marital intimate contact. Each chapter works with fiction or narratives inspired by biography or myth, ranging from the Book of Esther to the stories of Kafka. Weisbrod frames the book with running commentary on variations of the Madame Butterfly story, showing the ways in which fiction better expresses the complexities of intimate lives than does the language of the law.

Butterfly, the Bride looks at law from the outside, using narrative to provide a fresh perspective on the issues of law and social structure---and individual responses to law. This book thoroughly explores relationships between inner and public lives by examining what is ordinarily classified as the sphere of private life---the world of family relationships.

Carol Weisbrod is Ellen Ash Peters Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut. Her other books include The Boundaries of Utopia and Emblems of Pluralism.

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The Virgin and the Bride

Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity

Kate Cooper

Harvard University Press, 1996

During the last centuries of the Roman Empire, the prevailing ideal of feminine virtue was radically transformed: the pure but fertile heroines of Greek and Roman romance were replaced by a Christian heroine who ardently refused the marriage bed. How this new concept and figure of purity is connected with--indeed, how it abetted--social and religious change is the subject of Kate Cooper's lively book.

The Romans saw marital concord as a symbol of social unity--one that was important to maintaining the vigor and political harmony of the empire itself. This is nowhere more clear than in the ancient novel, where the mutual desire of hero and heroine is directed toward marriage and social renewal. But early Christian romance subverted the main outline of the story: now the heroine abandons her marriage partner for an otherworldly union with a Christian holy man. Cooper traces the reception of this new ascetic literature across the Roman world. How did the ruling classes respond to the Christian claim to moral superiority, represented by the new ideal of sexual purity? How did women themselves react to the challenge to their traditional role as matrons and matriarchs? In addressing these questions, Cooper gives us a vivid picture of dramatically changing ideas about sexuality, family, and morality--a cultural revolution with far-reaching implications for religion and politics, women and men.

The Virgin and the Bride offers a new look at central aspects of the Christianization of the Roman world, and an engaging discussion of the rhetoric of gender and the social meaning of idealized womanhood.

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