Love at a Venture
Book Details
| Title: | Love at a Venture | ||||||||||
| Author: |
| ||||||||||
| Published: | 1761 | ||||||||||
| Tags: | comedy, drama, farce, fiction | ||||||||||
| Description: | Mr. Belair has a problem -- frankly, he cannot keep it buttoned. In his pursuit of not one, not two, but four women, he unleashes a wave of chaos. Not only do two of the women find out and lay a trap for him, but one is the sister of a friend -- definitely beyond the pale. The plots and counter-plots leave him in a very tight spot. Cast of characters includes a brace of canny servants, a fop and an elderly husband, always good for a laugh -- but also a woman forced into an unhappy marriage for the sake of a brother and her struggles to please an unreasonable spouse. An unexpected bonus for the modern reader: the invention of the moving walkway. No, really. [Suggest a different description.] |
||||||||||
| Downloads: | 172 | ||||||||||
| Pages: | 165  |
Author Bio for Centlivre, Susanna
Susanna Centlivre (c. 1667 to 1670—1 December 1723), born Susanna Freeman and also known professionally as Susanna Carroll, was an English poet, actress, and "the most successful female playwright of the eighteenth century". Centlivre's "pieces continued to be acted after the theatre managers had forgotten most of her contemporaries." During a long career at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, she became known as the second woman of the English stage, after Aphra Behn.
Centlivre's plays show a strikingly liberal point of view. She wrote frankly in the face of strong sexual mores that discouraged women playwrights. Centlivre managed to push the boundaries of contemporary social norms, and yet she was widely appreciated only as a comic writer. She did not garner much positive critical acclaim. Although her plays enjoyed success in theatres, critics such as William Hazlitt wrote condescendingly of them. Alexander Pope found her writings offensive for political and religious reasons, and thought them a threat to greater dramatists by pandering to popular taste. He went so far as to assume that she had helped with Edmund Curll's pamphlet The Catholic Poet: or, Protestant Barnaby's Sorrowful Lamentation. For those reasons she was lampooned as having a supposedly mannish appearance (among other faults), most famously by Pope in several pieces. Regardless of her peers' opinions, her plays continued to be performed for over 150 years after her death.
Overall, Centlivre was a powerful influence on society as a female intellect. Her works encouraged female writers to continue to push the limits of traditional feminine roles by publicly treating the cause of equality between the sexes. The diarist Agnes Porter, governess to the children of the earl of Ilchester, saw a performance of Centlivre's The Busy Body at the Little Theatre, Haymarket on 7 March 1791, but wrote that it was "very badly performed".--Wikipedia.
Available Formats
| FILE TYPE | LINK | ||
| UTF-8 text | 20170640.txt | ||
| HTML | 20170640.html | ||
| Epub | 20170640.epub | If you cannot open a .mobi file on your mobile device, please use .epub with an appropriate eReader. | |
| Mobi/Kindle | 20170640.mobi | | Not all Kindles or Kindle apps open all .mobi files. |
| PDF (tablet) | 20170640-a5.pdf | ||
| HTML Zip | 20170640-h.zip |
Kindle Direct (New, Experimental)
Send this book direct to your kindle via email. We need your Send-to-Kindle Email address, which can be found by looking in your Kindle device’s Settings page. All kindle email addresses will end in @kindle.com. Note you must add our email server’s address, [email protected], to your Amazon account’s Approved E-mail list. This list may be found on your Amazon account: Your Account→ Manage Your Content and Devices→ Preferences→ Personal Document Settings→ Approved Personal Document E-mail List→ Add a new approved e-mail address.
This book is in the public domain in Canada, and is made available to you DRM-free. You may do whatever you like with this book, but mostly we hope you will read it.
Here at FadedPage and our companion site Distributed Proofreaders Canada, we pride ourselves on producing the best ebooks you can find. Please tell us about any errors you have found in this book, or in the information on this page about this book.