0,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Tidal Wave and Other Stories," Ethel M. Dell masterfully weaves an array of narratives that delve into the complexities of human emotions, romantic entanglements, and personal ambitions. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century society, her prose is characterized by rich imagery and an evocative style that blends realism with elements of romanticism. Dell's stories often feature strong, independent characters who navigate the tumultuous waters of societal expectations and personal desires, capturing the zeitgeist of her era in a manner both poignant and timeless. Born in 1881 in England, Ethel M. Dell's literary career flourished in an age when women writers were increasingly gaining visibility. Her upbringing in a family that valued education and creativity undoubtedly influenced her narrative approach. Dell's experiences during World War I and the subsequent societal shifts provided a fertile ground for her exploration of themes such as love, loss, and resilience. This personal history infused her work with authenticity and depth, making her a significant voice in early 20th-century literature. I highly recommend "The Tidal Wave and Other Stories" to readers who appreciate character-driven narratives rich in emotional depth and historical context. Dell'Äôs insights into the human condition resonate powerfully, enticing readers to reflect on their own experiences amid the tides of life.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
The Tidal Wave and Other Stories
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection brings together a series of narratives by Ethel M. Dell under one unifying banner, offering readers a concentrated encounter with her mature romantic craft. Rather than attempting to present a complete body of work, it assembles a coherent selection that displays range and continuity: an extended opening sequence arranged in chapters is followed by further self-contained pieces. The purpose is twofold: to showcase Dell’s command of sustained storytelling alongside briefer forms, and to trace recurrent images and concerns as they echo from one narrative to the next. Read as a whole, the volume functions as a portrait of an author’s methods, preoccupations, and tonal breadth.
The contents are prose fiction throughout, encompassing a mix of shorter tales and longer narratives that unfold across multiple chapters and, in one instance, a prologue. Some pieces operate with the concision and focus of short stories; others possess the amplitude of novellas, with room for reversals, deepened character arcs, and carefully staged climaxes. The variety of lengths and structures reflects Dell’s facility with different narrative tempos while maintaining a consistent emphasis on storytelling momentum. No plays, poems, essays, letters, or diaries are included; this is a unified selection of fiction designed to be read as individual works and as an interrelated suite.
A set of unifying themes binds these narratives into a larger design. Recurring images of currents, tides, voyages, circles, and havens furnish a vocabulary for charting inward movement—desire surging against duty, peril giving way to refuge, stillness disturbed by an unforeseen swell. Within these shifting conditions, Dell examines fidelity, courage, and the possibility of redemption. Her protagonists often face crises that demand steadfastness and sacrifice, and the drama lies as much in moral choice as in outward conflict. The collection’s metaphoric fabric turns elemental forces into emblems of psychological weather, linking story after story through resonant patterns rather than shared characters or settings.
The volume’s internal architecture enhances its thematic coherence. A multi-chapter opening arc modulates from quiet beginnings to gathering pressure, its sectional rhythm emphasizing thresholds and turning points. Subsequent narratives pivot to fresh situations and tonal registers, yet they continue the exploration of balance and imbalance—between watching and acting, solitude and solidarity, retreat and return. These pieces can be read independently, but their juxtaposition invites conversation among them: recurring motifs are reframed, questions posed in one story receive intriguingly altered answers in another, and the reader experiences variations on Dell’s key concerns as if moving across a series of linked chambers.
Stylistically, Dell favors clarity of line and an unembarrassed emotional candor that was widely read in the early twentieth century. Her scenes are built for impact: direct dialogue carries moral pressure, while compact descriptive strokes mirror inner disturbance or repose. Chapter divisions often coincide with decisive moments, preserving momentum and making even the longer pieces feel taut. She writes earnestly rather than ironically, cultivating sympathy for characters who must navigate competing loyalties. Familiar romantic elements—misunderstanding, devotion, risk—are orchestrated with a storyteller’s ear for crescendo and release, and with recurrent imagery that lends her narratives an added layer of symbolic coherence.
Considered as a whole, the collection is significant for how it distills the conventions and appeal of popular romantic fiction in its era while also displaying the author’s particular stamp. It demonstrates how narrative urgency can coexist with a marked moral compass, and how symbols drawn from the natural world can deepen the emotional stakes without recourse to elaborate exposition. The selection offers a compact vantage on Dell’s craft: not exhaustive, but representative, and attentive to the interplay of sentiment and suspense that helped define her readership. As such, it serves both as an introduction for new readers and a synthesis for admirers.
For contemporary audiences, the value of this collection lies in its layered readability. Taken one by one, the stories provide swift immersion and satisfying emotional arcs; read consecutively, they reveal a network of motifs—ebb and surge, loss and landing, distance and return—that enrich each subsequent tale. The prose is accessible, the stakes are clearly drawn, and the ethical questions remain recognizable: how to love well, how to be brave, and how to find safe passage through storm. This volume invites both enjoyment and reflection, illuminating why Dell’s narrative steadfastness and symbolic economy continue to register beyond their original moment.
Historical Context
Ethel May Dell (1881–1939), born in Streatham, London, wrote popular romantic fiction that bridged the Edwardian era and the interwar years. Her breakout success, The Way of an Eagle (1911), established the intense emotional register, moral earnestness, and frontier or coastal settings that recur throughout The Tidal Wave and Other Stories. Writing from England but imagining imperial and maritime worlds, Dell addressed a mass readership hungry for tales of courage, devotion, and redemption. By the time this collection appeared in London in the early 1920s, she had become a best-selling author whose narratives spoke to readers negotiating upheavals in love, class, and empire.
The imperial context of the British Raj underpins many of Dell’s character types and scenarios, even when scenes unfold in England. Anglo-Indian society—Simla in the Himalayan foothills, cantonments in the Punjab, the North-West Frontier—had long supplied British fiction with officers, memsahibs, and moral tests tied to duty and honor. The Indian Councils Acts (1892, 1909) and the reverberations of 1857 remained part of the cultural memory that lent gravity to desert marches, jungle risks, and colonial isolation. The oscillation between homeland and outpost—letters, furloughs, and long journeys—energizes recurring motifs of return, rescue, and reckoning found across this collection.
The First World War (1914–1918) profoundly shaped the emotional climate in which Dell wrote and her readers interpreted romance. Britain’s naval convoys, U-boat losses, and home-front vigilance produced a maritime imagination in which storms and shipwrecks resonated with national anxiety. The Titanic disaster (1912) and the sinking of the Lusitania (1915) had already framed the sea as both pathway and peril; hence titles evoking tides, deep waters, long voyages, and safe havens carried a heightened charge after Armistice. Demobilization, shell shock, and mourning—compounded by the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic—inflected themes of endurance, sacrificial love, and the hard-won promise of a harbor.
Shifting gender relations inform Dell’s heroines and heroes. The Representation of the People Act (1918) enfranchised many women over 30, and the Equal Franchise Act (1928) later extended the vote at 21. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act (1919) opened professions, while the Matrimonial Causes Act (1923) eased divorce, altering the stakes of courtship and marriage. Against this legal backdrop, Dell’s narratives balance chivalric protection with female agency, dramatizing negotiations between passion and propriety. Modern leisure—motoring, seaside holidays, dance halls—contrasts with inherited codes of guardianship and honor. Across these stories, domestic “safe havens” are claimed rather than merely endowed, echoing contemporary debates over companionate marriage.
Dell’s career unfolded within the late-Victorian and Edwardian book trade shaped by the Net Book Agreement (1900), which stabilized prices and fueled circulating libraries. Titles by London houses such as Cassell & Company and Hodder & Stoughton reached readers through Boots Booklovers’ Library and W. H. Smith’s railway bookstalls. Short stories and novellas flourished amid wartime paper controls (from 1917), encouraging compact forms later gathered into volumes like The Tidal Wave and Other Stories. Advertising in mass-circulation newspapers (e.g., the Daily Mail) and serialized fiction in popular magazines created national audiences that could follow Dell’s recurring concerns—crisis, rescue, and moral awakening—across multiple pieces.
Contemporary cultural debates helped define Dell’s reputation. The period’s “highbrow versus lowbrow” controversy—later codified by critics like Q. D. Leavis in Fiction and the Reading Public (1932)—targeted bestselling romances even as they sold in the hundreds of thousands. Writers and humorists such as P. G. Wodehouse and Saki jokingly invoked “Ethel M. Dell” as shorthand for passionate melodrama, confirming her fame. Silent-film adaptations of her novels in the late 1910s and early 1920s by British studios (including Stoll Picture Productions) and American companies widened her reach, reinforcing the cross-media appeal of tropes also present here: the perilous journey, the steadfast lover, and the hard-earned embrace.
Intellectual currents of the early twentieth century colored Dell’s imagery and choice of titles. The popularization of mythic thinking through James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (expanded 1890–1915) made figures like the Minotaur familiar metaphors for entrapment and ordeal. The spread of psychoanalytic ideas—Sigmund Freud’s work gained English readers before and after his 1913 London lectures—legitimized introspective “visions” and the language of inner storms. Postwar spiritualism and the Society for Psychical Research provided a vocabulary for yearning and presence across distance. Simultaneously, the Georgian poets’ pastoral revival lent dignity to midsummer light, moonlit coasts, and garden enclosures that serve as stages for moral testing and renewal.
Dell’s later life underscores the continuity of these themes. She married Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Tahourdin Savage in 1925 and settled at Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, remaining within sight and sound of the maritime horizon that haunts this collection. She died in 1939, as Britain braced for another war, closing a career that had tracked a nation from Edwardian confidence to interwar uncertainty. Read together, the voyages, visions, boons, and returns in The Tidal Wave and Other Stories gather experiences common between roughly 1911 and the early 1930s: departures to imperial stations, separations and shocks of war, and the arduous search for a haven where love and duty may finally coincide.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Tidal Wave (Ch. I–XII: Still Waters; The Passion-Flower; The Minotaur; The Rising Tide; Midsummer Morning; The Midsummer Moon; The Death Current; The Boon; The Vision; The Long Voyage; Deep Waters; The Safe Haven)
In a quiet coastal community, a seemingly steady attachment is overwhelmed by a surge of passion and peril; mounting emotional and literal dangers at sea push the principals toward a decisive choice between ruin and refuge.
The Magic Circle
A woman hemmed in by obligation and social pressure finds an unexpected sanctuary in steadfast devotion, as a protective bond challenges pride, fear, and the claims of the outside world.
The Looker-On (Ch. I–X)
A self-effacing observer is drawn from the margins into the heart of a romantic crisis, where intervention exposes hidden loyalties and awakens his own capacity for love.
The Second Fiddle
Long overshadowed by a more dazzling rival, the protagonist is forced by circumstance to take the lead, revealing the quiet strength and constancy that reframe a faltering romance.
The Woman of His Dream (Prologue; Ch. I–XI)
A man pursues the ideal he has long imagined, and the pursuit steadily confronts him with the gap between fantasy and reality as both parties learn what enduring love demands.
The Return Game (Ch. I–XIV)
Estranged lovers meet again and engage in a wary contest of wills; strategic pride gives way to candor as they test whether forgiveness and trust can restore them to each other.
