Allison Miriam Smith – författare

A Marsh Island (1885) by Sarah Orne Jewett is a a gentle yet vivid tale of life in a small New England coastal community. Told through rich, naturalistic detail, the novel follows the intertwined lives of islanders who live in harmony with the rhythms of nature, exploring themes of queerness, friendship, tradition, and the quiet beauty of everyday life. “A warm draft of kindness billows from A Marsh Island... Discerning, tender and pellucid in its beauty, this is the kind of small, perfect novel it is hard to imagine anybody not loving.” —Sam Sacks, WSJ

Part of the Smith & Taylor Classics series, this beautifully bound edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs celebrates one of American literature’s quiet treasures.A nameless writer has come to Dunnet Landing, a small town on the coast of Maine, for the summer in order to finish her manuscript.Compared to the hectic pace of the city she's left behind, she finds herself absorbed in the slow rhythms of her new daily life. Her observations of the residents of Dunnet Landing—their loves, their fights, their occupation with sky and sea and land, their tall tales, and quiet secrets—comprise The Country of the Pointed Firs. It is a novel seemingly made from the very fabric of community. Jewett’s beautiful, delicate descriptions and her wonderfully natural dialogue bring the whole town and its many inhabitants to life.Once described by Henry James as Jewett’s “beautiful little quantum of achievement,” The Country of the Pointed Firs is a stunning testament to the power of place and memory.Featuring a conversational afterword from writer Brandy Jensen and Professor Stephanie Insley Hershinow.

When their father’s death leaves them with no money and a dim future, the Madden sisters, Alice, Virginia, and Monica, must negotiate the gender roles and class constraints of 1890s Victorian London.  Rediscover a boldly political title from the early feminist movement with a stunning keepsake edition of The Odd Women from Smith & Taylor Classics. Virginia and Alice have aged out of the possibility of marriage and seemingly the idea of love itself. They find themselves with few prospects and little hope. Remaindered in the marriage equation, these “odd women” face a great deal of scrutiny, stigma, and social pressure—it’s at this time that Rhoda Nunn, childhood friend to the Madden sisters, arrives in London to challenge accepted norms and mores around the role of women in society. Rhoda’s strong feminist passion draws a sharp contrast to the middle-class respectability of the Madden sisters’ upbring, as the sisters watch a new world emerge around them.  Gissing’s The Odd Women captures the absurdity, brutality, and even comedy of Victorian attitudes around the brilliant women who dared to be odd by conceiving of their role in society beyond their value as wives. Featuring a conversational afterword from writers Merve Emre and Adam Dalva.

This Smith & Taylor Classics keepsake edition reintroduces Elizabeth Gaskell’s enduring tale of love, labor, and social change.Set amid the rapidly changing social, spiritual, and moral landscape of the industrial revolution, North and South is a forceful, brilliant, and romantic novel about freedom and the cost of profit.When Margaret Hale, a minister’s daughter, relocates with her family to Milton in the north of England she witnesses firsthand the brutal working conditions in Milton’s factories and mills. Her liberal education has given her strong convictions, but little common sense, and her pity finds a mostly unsympathetic ear among the gruff mill workers and their families.Magaret is most vexed by a local industrialist and mill-owner, John Thornton, whom she considers contemptuous and bull-headed. But through her clashes with Thornton and her growing affinity for the workers and their plight for survival, Margaret comes to see the world as a much more complicated place, and that her earlier pity was not charity but a kind of arrogance.Thunderously philosophical and compulsively readable, North and South is a vivid portrayal of not only unthinking conformity or selfish individualism, but the power of vulnerability and change.Featuring a conversational afterword from writer Adrienne Garcia-Specht and actor Morgan Spector.

Part of the Smith & Taylor Classics series, this elegant edition revives one of Victorian literature’s most thrilling and subversive novels. Lucy Graham, radiantly beautiful, born to poverty, and Sir Michael Audley, aging aristocratic widower and fabulously wealthy, are married soon after first glance.  Life is peaceful at old Audley Court until the arrival of Robert Audley– Sir Michael’s nephew– and his friend George Talboys, who is home again after making his fortune in Australia.  When George mysteriously disappears, Robert takes it upon himself to find him again. Developing a detective’s eye, following disturbing clue after clue, Robert becomes convinced his alluring Aunt Lucy isn’t as innocent, or possibly as sane, as she seems. Lady Audley’s Secret first appeared in Robin Goodfellow magazine in 1861, establishing it as a “sensational” novel to rival Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860). A cunningly plotted mystery novel as sensual as a Pre-Raphaelite portrait, Lady Audley’s Secret probes mid-Victorian anxieties about the rapid rise of consumerism with the invention of one of literature’s great villainesses who goes to great lengths to secure her greatest desires. Featuring a conversational afterword from writers Sarah Weinman and Rachel Vorona Cote.

Smith & Taylor Classics proudly presents this keepsake edition of Wuthering Heights, a novel that has captivated readers for generations. When Lockwood seeks relief from a lashing storm in the surly hospitality of Heathcliff, master of Wuthering Heights, a grand house on Yorkshire moors, he can’t imagine the tale that he will soon hear.It is a tale of passion and revenge involving Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, his childhood best friend and the love of his life who deals him a stunning betrayal. Reader and Lockwood both are held spellbound by the story of Heathcliff’s quest for vengeance and his bitter acrimony which has devastating consequences for all.For generations, Emily Brontë’s novel of suspense and operatic intensity has enraptured and moved readers to fall in love with Heathcliff’s dark moods and brooding intensity. Salient to this day, this novel is a surprisingly modern exploration of race, gender, class, and the ways that love is frustrated and thwarted by bigotry and prejudice.Featuring a conversational afterword from writers Noreen Masud and Derrick Austin.

Engage with the timeless themes of Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, beautifully captured in the Smith & Taylor Classics series.“My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown.”In his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Edgar Allan Poe carries his knack for the mysterious and macabre, spilt blood and cryptic messages onto the South Seas. Aboard a whaling ship, stowaway Pym will endure starvation, cannibalism, whirlpools, mad dogs and premature burials on a journey toward the frozen expanse of Antarctica.Published the year full emancipation was legalized by the UK’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, Arthur Gordon Pym captures the relentless anxiety and violence of pre-Civil War American expansion. Allegorical, tragic, and based on real events, this adventure story went on to inspire many authors from Herman Melville and Jules Verne, to H.G. Wells and Vladmir Nabokov. This edition also includes accompanying selected letters, essays, and criticism from Poe himself.Featuring a conversational afterword from writers Nathan Wolff and Joseph Rezek.

With this elegant edition, Smith & Taylor Classics celebrates Levy’s sharp and modern tale of ambition, survival, and the female gaze. The Romance of a Shop follows the four Lorimer sisters in the wake of their father’s death. Penniless and reliant on each other, they decide to open a photography studio at 20B Baker Street, offering the citizens of London quality portraits.  It’s the 1880s and photography is not only growing in popularity and accessibility, but those with a critical eye are elevating the medium associated with quick and steady cash into a true art form. With more women entering the workforce out of necessity and rebellion, the Lorimer sisters take advantage of newfound independence as they work to survive poverty, the grind and smoke of London, fraught courtships, and melodramatic twists of fate. A novel of sisterhood, love, the female gaze and postmortem photography Levy deftly balances along the thin lines of romance and realism, art and commerce. Featuring a conversational afterword from writers Ruth Madievsky and Rachel León.

Bewitching ghost stories from seminal short story writer Vernon Lee, beautifully captured in the Smith & Taylor Classics series.   “My ghosts are what you call spurious ghosts, of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, among others, my own…”   Shipwrecked before a remote Italian coastal village, a young girl discovers the ability to command love and incite madness; a Polish historian is drawn to the enigmatic allure of a medieval Duchess with a deadly past; a painter, hired to capture the likeness of a reclusive couple, slowly uncovers a mysterious love affair; and a man with a voice that is as deadly as it is beautiful eats away at the health of those who hear him sing, troubling a composer years later.   Once described by Henry James as being “as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent,” Vernon Lee’s ghost stories haunt as much as they reveal an obsession with art, architecture, and deadly, queer desires. Even the smallest vibration from the past signals danger for the characters in Hauntings: from the emanations of old houses and old books to the discovery of old portraits, objects come alive and worm into the minds of the living. Featuring a conversational afterword from writers Gretchen Felker-Martin and Kayla Jumari Upadhyaya.

As part of the Smith & Taylor Classics collection, this edition preserves Fanny Hill in its full provocative force, complete with new critical commentary. Banned from publication in the United States until 1966 for its assumed obscenity, immorality, and lack of literary merit, Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), is a novel considered to be the first original English prose erotica. This is the tale of the titular Fanny Hill, told to us in her own letters with “stark naked truth.” Young, orphaned, and naïve, she recounts her early days of prostitution in bawdy eighteenth-century London and her dramatic rise to respectability. An important work of political, social, and sexual parody and philosophy, the author himself was imprisoned at the time of publication for his depictions of sexual “deviance” as an act of pleasure rather than simply shameful. Fanny Hill deserves its place in continued publication not only for its role in securing rights for erotica, but for its surprisingly modern, explicit, and complicated depictions of sex, love-making, money-talk, and homosexuality. This uncensored version is set from the 1749 edition and includes a new introduction by Chelsea G. Summers, as well as a conversational afterword between Summers and Jessica Stoya. Featuring a conversational afterword from writers Chelsea G. Summers and Jessica Stoya. Celebrate Banned Book Day at libraries across the United States August 4th!

Miles Franklin is Australia’s progressive literary star. A feminist and staunch supporter of women in the arts, her novel MY BRILLIANT CAREER (1901) was written when she was a teenager, but it remains a testament to the electric energy of a teen girl of ambition who thinks she’s just too smart and too ugly for this world. We’ve all been there.Follow wild-haired Sybylla as she picks up her pen to try and write her way out of oppressive poverty in rural Australia, her father’s drinking debts, and obscene marriage proposals that simply cramp her style.

Edith Wharton's little discussed Jazz Age classic, The Mother’s Recompense (1925), finds Kate Clephane returning to New York society, after abandoning her husband and three-year-old daughter years before. American Kate Clephane has lived in Europe for twenty years, the ghosts of a failed marriage and abandoned daughter haunting her as she drifts along the French Riviera. It is an  aimless, turbulent life, lived in the company of other expats and outcasts, the scars of World War I still evident across the continent. When Kate is summoned back to New York by the very daughter (now a wealthy heiress) she once abandoned, Kate leaps at the chance to re-enter the world that previously shut its doors on her. Just as Kate is on the cusp of reclaiming the life she forfeited, Chris Fenno, her former lover, returns to the scene, this time as a suitor for Kate’s daughter. For Kate, this disaster cuts two ways, for not only is Chris an opportunistic and feckless man, but he also remains the love of Kate’s life. Thus begins a complex and intricate dance of secrets, desires, scandal, and shifting motives. The Mother’s Recompense is a brilliant commentary on freedom, motherhood, agency, and duty. It explores the full weight of the choices we make as we try and fail to reinvent and reimagine ourselves. Wharton’s gifts for wit, dialogue, and image are put to stunning use in this riveting social drama that sees New York society shaken to its very foundations.

Mellstock is a small Dorset village with strong opinions about church music. When the new schoolmistress, Fancy Day, arrives and promptly captivates every man in the parish, the village's band of folk musicians finds itself contending with two threats at once: the vicar's plan to replace them with a modern organ, and the distraction of watching Dick Dewy fall helplessly in love. Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) is Hardy's first major novel and his most quietly contented one. Organised by the seasons, rooted in rural English life, and genuinely funny, it’s a portrait of a tight-knit community on the cusp of change. A new world is encroaching, but slowly. For now, there is courtship, there is snow on a clear Christmas Eve night and wind in the trees, and there is music.