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Perchance to Dream (The Twilight Zone)

"Perchance to Dream" is the ninth episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It originally aired on November 27, 1959, on CBS. The title of the episode and the Charles Beaumont short story that inspired it is taken from Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" speech.

Opening narration
Twelve o'clock noon. An ordinary scene, an ordinary city. Lunchtime for thousands of ordinary people. To most of them, this hour will be a rest, a pleasant break in a day's routine. To most, but not all. To Edward Hall, time is an enemy, and the hour to come is a matter of life and death.

Plot
Edward Hall seeks the aid of psychiatrist Dr. Eliot Rathmann. When he first enters the doctor's office, so tired he is barely able to stand, Rathmann helps him to the couch. Hall begins to drift into sleep, but suddenly jolts awake and gets up. When pressed by Rathmann, he explains he has a heart condition, and also believes that his overactive imagination is severely out of control, to the point where he's been able to see and feel something that is not there. Due to this, his heart condition is especially dangerous. He also explains that, when he has allowed himself to sleep he has been dreaming in chapters, as if in a movie serial. In his dreams, Maya "The Cat Girl", a carnival dancer, lures him first into a funhouse and later onto a roller coaster in an attempt to frighten him.

He is now convinced that if he falls asleep, he'll die. On the other hand, keeping himself awake will put too much of a strain on his heart. Feeling that Rathmann cannot help him, Hall starts to leave, but stops when he sees that Rathmann's receptionist looks exactly like Maya. Terrified, he runs back into Rathmann's office and jumps out the window to his death.

In reality, the doctor calls his receptionist into his office, where Hall lies on the couch, his eyes closed. Rathmann tells the receptionist that Hall came in, laid down, immediately fell asleep, and then a few moments later let out a scream and died. "Well, I guess there are worse ways to go," the doctor says philosophically. "At least he died peacefully..."

Closing narration
They say a dream takes only a second or so, and yet in that second a man can live a lifetime. He can suffer and die, and who's to say which is the greater reality: the one we know or the one in the dreams, between heaven, the sky, the earth - in the Twilight Zone.

Preview for next week's story
Once upon a time, there was a ship sailing from Liverpool, England to New York. It never got there and one man onboard knew why. Next week, we tell this man's story. The distinguished actor Nehemiah Persoff plays the role of Carl Lanser, a haunted man in a haunting story called "Judgment Night". This ship sails next week and we hope you'll see it off. Thank you and good night.

Episode notes

 * This was the first episode aired that was written by Charles Beaumont (and also the first that was not written by Rod Serling).
 * "Throughout the TV filming, Florey strove for quality. It might have been the most expensive MGM feature. He rooted out the meanings of certain lines, frequently surprising me with symbols and shadings I'd neither planned nor suspected. The set was truly impressionistic, recalling the days of Caligari and Liliom. The costumes were generally perfect. And in the starring role, Richard Conte gave a performance which displays both intensity and subtlety." ―Charles Beaumont writing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1959.
 * This is one of several episodes from season one to have its opening title sequence plastered over with the opening for season two. This was done during the Summer of 1961 in order to give the re-running episodes of season one the new look that the show would take in the upcoming second season.
 * It has been speculated that this episode and the novella which spawned it served as Wes Craven's inspiration for the Nightmare on Elm Street series, particularly since both Craven (who himself directed several episodes of TZ during the 1980s) and Beaumont deal with a common theme; fear of sleep, over something which literally kills in one's dreams. Craven, however, insisted that his work was never inspired by Beaumont's.

Radio drama
The episode was adapted for radio in 2002 featuring Fred Willard as Edward Hall. It was then released as part of The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas – Volume 9 collection.

title: Perchance to Dream (The Twilight Zone)


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Talk:Morgan County, West Virginia

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Talk:Nicholas County, West Virginia

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Talk:Ohio County, West Virginia

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 * The inclusion of the History of Wheeling City and Ohio County, West Virginia by the Hon. Gibson Lamb Cranmer might require a footnote instead of merely an external link. If anyone thinks this is necessary for this article, feel free to make the changes. --Mphamilton 07:22, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

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Substituted at 01:44, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

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G.711

G.711 is a narrowband audio codec originally designed for use in telephony that provides toll-quality audio at 64 kbit/s. It is an ITU-T standard (Recommendation) for audio encoding, titled Pulse code modulation (PCM) of voice frequencies released for use in 1972.

G.711 passes audio signals in the frequency band of 300–3400 Hz and samples them at the rate of 8000 Hz, with the tolerance on that rate of 50 parts per million (ppm).

It uses one of two different logarithmic companding algorithms: μ-law, which is used primarily in North America and Japan, and A-law, which is in use in most other countries outside North America. Each companded sample is quantized as 8 bits, resulting in a 64 kbit/s bit rate.

G.711 is a required standard in many technologies, such as in the H.320 and H.323 standards. It can also be used for fax communication over IP networks (as defined in T.38 specification).

Two enhancements to G.711 have been published: G.711.0 utilizes lossless data compression to reduce the bandwidth usage and G.711.1 increases audio quality by increasing bandwidth.

Features

 * 8 kHz sampling frequency
 * 64 kbit/s bitrate (8 kHz sampling frequency × 8 bits per sample)
 * Typical algorithmic delay is 0.125 ms, with no look-ahead delay
 * G.711 is a waveform speech coder
 * G.711 Appendix I defines a packet loss concealment (PLC) algorithm to help hide transmission losses in a packetized network
 * G.711 Appendix II defines a discontinuous transmission (DTX) algorithm which uses voice activity detection (VAD) and comfort noise generation (CNG) to reduce bandwidth usage during silence periods
 * PSQM testing under ideal conditions yields mean opinion scores of 4.45 for G.711 μ-law, 4.45 for G.711 A-law
 * PSQM testing under network stress yields mean opinion scores of 4.13 for G.711 μ-law, 4.11 for G.711 A-law

Types
G.711 defines two main companding algorithms, the μ-law algorithm and A-law algorithm. Both are logarithmic, but A-law was specifically designed to be simpler for a computer to process. The standard also defines a sequence of repeating code values which defines the power level of 0 dB.

The μ-law and A-law algorithms encode 14-bit and 13-bit signed linear PCM samples (respectively) to logarithmic 8-bit samples. Thus, the G.711 encoder will create a 64 kbit/s bitstream for a signal sampled at 8 kHz.

G.711 μ-law tends to give more resolution to higher range signals while G.711 A-law provides more quantization levels at lower signal levels.

The terms PCMU, G711u and G711MU are also used for G.711 μ-law, and PCMA and G711A for G.711 A-law.

A-law
A-law encoding thus takes a 13-bit signed linear audio sample as input and converts it to an 8 bit value as follows:

is its inverse (i.e. positive values are encoded with MSB = $\overline{s}$ = 1), and bits marked x are discarded. Note that the first column of the table uses different representation of negative values than the third column. So for example, input decimal value −21 is represented in binary after bit inversion as 1000000010100, which maps to 00001010 (according to the first row of the table). When decoding, this maps back to 1000000010101, which is interpreted as output value −21 in decimal. Input value +52 (0000000110100 in binary) maps to 10011010 (according to the second row), which maps back to 0000000110101 (+53 in decimal).

This can be seen as a floating-point number with 4 bits of mantissa m (equivalent to a 5-bit precision), 3 bits of exponent e and 1 sign bit s, formatted as  with the decoded linear value y given by formula
 * $$y = (-1)^s \cdot (16 \cdot \min \{ e, 1 \} + m + 0.5) \cdot 2^{\max \{ e, 1 \} },$$

which is a 13-bit signed integer in the range ±1 to ±(2$\overline{s}$ − 2$\overline{s}$). Note that no compressed code decodes to zero due to the addition of 0.5 (half of a quantization step).

In addition, the standard specifies that all resulting even bits (LSB is even) are inverted before the octet is transmitted. This is to provide plenty of 0/1 transitions to facilitate the clock recovery process in the PCM receivers. Thus, a silent A-law encoded PCM channel has the 8 bit samples coded 0xD5 instead of 0x80 in the octets.

When data is sent over E0 (G.703), MSB (sign) is sent first and LSB is sent last.

ITU-T STL defines the algorithm for decoding as follows (it puts the decoded values in the 13 most significant bits of the 16-bit output data type).

See also "ITU-T Software Tool Library 2009 User's manual" that can be found at.

μ-law
The μ-law (sometimes referred to as ulaw, G.711Mu, or G.711μ) encoding takes a 14-bit signed linear audio sample in two's complement representation as input, inverts all bits after the sign bit if the value is negative, adds 33 (binary 100001) and converts it to an 8 bit value as follows:

into 4 bits of mantissa m, 3 bits of exponent e and 1 sign bit s, the decoded linear value y is given by formula
 * $$y = (-1)^s \cdot [(33 + 2m) \cdot 2^e - 33],$$

which is a 14-bit signed integer in the range ±0 to ±8031.

Note that 0 is transmitted as 0xFF, and −1 is transmitted as 0x7F, but when received the result is 0 in both cases.

G.711.0
G.711.0, also known as G.711 LLC, utilizes lossless data compression to reduce the bandwidth usage by as much as 50 percent. The Lossless compression of G.711 pulse code modulation standard was approved by ITU-T in September 2009.

G.711.1
G.711.1 "Wideband embedded extension for G.711 pulse code modulation" is a higher-fidelity extension to G.711, ratified in 2008 and further extended in 2012.

G.711.1 allows a series of enhancement layers on top of a raw G.711 core stream (Layer 0): Layer 1 codes 16-bit audio in the same 4kHz narrowband, and Layer 2 allows 8kHz wideband using MDCT; each uses a fixed 16 kbps in addition to the 64 kbps core. They may be used together or singly, and each encodes the differences from the previous layer. Ratified in 2012, Layer 3 extends Layer 2 to 16kHz "superwideband," allowing another 16 kbps for the highest frequencies, while retaining layer independence. Peak bitrate becomes 96 kbps in original G.711.1, or 112 kbps with superwideband. No internal method of identifying or separating the layers is defined, leaving it to the implementation to packetize or signal them.

A decoder that doesn't understand any set of fidelity layers may ignore or drop non-core packets without affecting it, enabling graceful degradation across any G.711 (or original G.711.1) telephony system with no changes.

Also ratified in 2012 was G.711.0 lossless extended to the new fidelity layers. Like G.711.0, full G.711 backward compatibility is sacrificed for efficiency, though a G.711.0 aware node may still ignore or drop layer packets it doesn't understand.

Licensing
The patents for G.711, released in 1972, have expired, so it may be used without the need for a licence.

title: G.711


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Quartet in Autumn

Quartet in Autumn is a novel by British novelist Barbara Pym, first published in 1977. It was highly praised and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the top literary prize in the UK. This was considered a comeback novel for Pym; she had fallen out of favour as styles changed, and her work had been rejected by publishers for 15 years. This followed her successful record as a novelist during the 1950s and early 1960s. As a novel, it represents a departure from her earlier style of light comedy, as it is the story of four office workers on the verge of retirement.

Plot summary
Marcia, Letty, Norman and Edwin work in the same office. None is married (Edwin being a widower) and all are nearing retirement age. Letty plans to move to the country and live with her long-time friend Marjorie, a widow. She has to change her plans when Marjorie announces that she is to marry a clergyman some years younger than herself.

The house in which Letty has a bedsit is sold and she becomes uncomfortable there. Edwin finds her a room in the house of an elderly widow, where she is reasonably comfortable. Letty and Marcia retire at the same time. Marcia, already reclusive, and vulnerable after having a breast removed, has to deal with the loss of the routine that was an essential part of her life. She withdraws even further from the outside world, and eats less and less. She is found in a state of collapse by a voluntary social worker who has been visiting her, and, coincidentally, by Edwin and his parish priest. She is taken to hospital but dies a few days later, weighing six stone. She has unexpectedly left her house to Norman, in whom she had indulged a brief and secret semi-romantic interest.

When Marjorie's fiancé deserts her for a younger woman, she renews her invitation to Letty to come and live with her. But by now Letty is not so sure she wants to live in the country, and does not immediately make up her mind. She realises that she has opportunities to make her own choices. Similarly, Norman enjoys being in a position to decide whether or not to live in Marcia's house, though he is inclined to sell it.

At the end of the book, Letty tells Norman and Edwin that Marjorie has invited the three of them to join her for a day in the country. She thinks this would be a consolation for the jilted Marjorie, and, though she envisages no romantic developments, enjoys being in a position to supply some male company.

Publication history
Pym conceived of the novel in 1972: "Have thought of an idea for a novel based on our office move – all old, crabby characters, petty and obsessive, bad tempered – how easily one of them could have a false breast! But I'd better not write it till I have time to concentrate on it (look what happened to the last)."

At the time, Pym was still working full-time at the International African Institute in London, and recovering from a mastectomy after developing cancer in her left breast. As she transitioned to retirement in late 1973 and 1974, Pym commenced work on the novel. Whereas most of her novels had been written in short time spans, Pym took three years to write Quartet in Autumn. She had not had a novel published since 1961, and had no realistic expectations that this would be either. She completed the novel in 1976, under the original title of Four Point Turn. The poet Philip Larkin, who had a long-running correspondence with Pym, read the final draft and found it very strong. He was surprised by the sombre tone, so unlike Pym's earlier comic style, and suggested the title did not suit. Pym submitted the novel to Hamish Hamilton Limited in 1976 but it was rejected.

On 21 January 1977, The Times Literary Supplement ran an article in which high-profile literary figures named their most underrated and overrated authors or books of the previous 75 years. Pym was chosen as the most underrated writer by both Larkin and Lord David Cecil; she was the only novelist to be selected by two contributors. On the strength of this review, literary interest in Pym was revived after 16 years, and she was approached by several publishers for new material.

Quartet in Autumn was published by Macmillan in 1977. It was published in the United States by E.P. Dutton the following year, the second of her novels to be so (Less than Angels had been published in a small run in the 1950s) and the first to have mainstream success in the US.

The novel was released as an audiobook by Chivers Press, read by Elizabeth Stephan. It was published in Portugal as Quarteto no Outono, France as Quatuor d'automne, Germany as Quartett im Herbst, and Turkey as Sonbahar Kuarteti.

Reception
Combined with the media interest after the piece in The Times Literary Supplement, Quartet in Autumn was a success, with almost universally positive reviews, including in The Guardian and The Sunday Times. Kirkus Reviews considered the book "Terribly brisk, but very affecting". The only publications to write mixed reviews were The Sunday Telegraph and the New Statesman. As this was the first time most American readers had heard of Pym, there was especial interest in her from American media outlets. The New York Review of Books favourably reviewed Quartet alongside the earlier Excellent Women while The New York Times published a review entitled The Best High Comedy.

The novel was shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize, but the winner was Paul Scott's Staying On.

Connections to other works
Edwin remembers Father Thames and Father Bode from A Glass of Blessings.

Adaptation
Quartet in Autumn was serialised by BBC radio on its Woman's Hour programme in 1978.

In 2015, York Theatre Royal commissioned a workshop version of a stage adaptation, written by Amanda Whittington and directed by C P Hallam.

title: Quartet in Autumn


text:
Talk:Pendleton County, West Virginia

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Some Tame Gazelle

Some Tame Gazelle is Barbara Pym's first novel, originally published in 1950.

The title of the book is taken from the poem "Something to Love" by Thomas Haynes Bayly, and the work of other English poets is frequently referenced during the course of the story. First started during Pym's period studying at Oxford University, it contains many sly references to those she knew there.

Plot
The novel details episodes in the life of Belinda Bede, a spinster now in her fifties who shares a house with her younger, more dominant sister Harriet, who is also unmarried. Since her university days, Belinda has loved the village's Archdeacon Hoccleve, with whom she studied then, although he had preferred to marry the better-connected Agatha, a bishop's daughter. Harriet has an admirer in the village, the Italian Count Ricardo Bianco, who regularly proposes marriage to her, but her preference has always been to look after the welfare of young curates.

At the time the story begins, Mr Donne is the newly arrived curate in the village. Eventually he becomes engaged to Olivia Berridge, an academic specialising in Middle English literature and a niece of Agatha Hoccleve. But in the meantime, Agatha leaves for a visit to a German spa and another of Belinda's and the Archdeacon's student acquaintances comes to stay at the vicarage. This is Dr Parnell, now head of the main university library, who is accompanied by his assistant, the socially suspect Mr Mold. Before leaving, Mr Mold proposes marriage to Harriet and, refused, takes it calmly by visiting the local pub and counting himself well escaped.

When Agatha returns, she brings home Dr Grote, the colonial bishop of Mbawawa, a former protégé of Harriet's during the time when he was a curate. Belinda begins to see in him another threat to her peaceful coexistence with her sister, but it is to herself that the bishop proposes in the end. When he too is rejected, he proposes instead to Connie Aspinall, a decayed gentlewoman living in the same village, and is accepted.

Harmony returns to the disrupted community with the marriage of Mr Donne and Olivia Berridge and their subsequent departure. As life returns to normal, a new curate arrives to claim Harriet's attention, while Belinda finds "such consolation as she needed in our greater English poets", gardening and good works.

Publication history
Pym started to write Some Tame Gazelle in 1934, shortly after completing her studies at St Hilda's College, Oxford. The novel was rejected by several publishers, including Jonathan Cape and Gollancz. Cape expressed interest in Pym's writing, however, and encouraged her to make some alterations to the text and consider re-submitting. Pym's friend, the up-and-coming literary critic Robert Liddell, provided detailed criticism of the novel to assist with edits.

World War II interrupted Pym's budding literary career, and she finally revised the novel to the point where it was accepted by Cape in 1950. The novel sold 3,544 copies in Great Britain by the end of the 1950s, which was not a bestselling figure but was reasonable for a debut novelist. Among alternative titles that Pym considered were Some Sad Turtle and The Well Tam'd Heart.

The novel was first published in the United States by E.P. Dutton in 1983. In 2012, it was released as an audiobook by Hachette. Some Tame Gazelle was published in Italy as Qualcuno da amare (Someone to love) and in France with the title literally translated as Comme une gazelle apprivoisée.

Reception
The novel received several positive reviews. The Manchester Guardian called it "an enchanting book about village life" while Antonia White reviewed the novel for the New Statesman: "(Pym) keeps her design so perfectly to scale, and places one mild tint in such happy juxtaposition to another that this reader ... derived considerable pleasure from it."

It has been considered a remarkable first novel, because of the way in which the youthful Pym — who began the book while still a student — imagined herself into the situation of a middle-aged spinster, living with her sister in the country. The poet Philip Larkin regarded Some Tame Gazelle as Pym's Pride and Prejudice

Characters
Two months after she had begun work on the first draft in 1934, Barbara Pym noted in her diary that "Some time in July I began writing a story about Hilary and me as spinsters of fiftyish. Henry, Jock and all of us appeared in it." There exists a first edition of its much edited final version annotated in the author's hand with a pencilled list identifying the characters based on her friends and associates. A later scholar has therefore drawn the conclusion that originally Some Tame Gazelle "was to be a roman à clef for her particular circle".

Besides herself and her sister Hilary, who are the characters Belinda and Harriet Bede, many others with whom Barbara Pym had associated at Oxford were included, sometimes under revealing names. Henry Harvey, her (and Belinda's) abiding love interest, is transformed into Archdeacon Hoccleve; the Archdeacon's wife Agatha is identified with, not the woman that Henry eventually married, but Alison West–Watson, a more successful girlfriend than was Barbara. Three of the characters were based on former librarians at the Bodleian at one time or another, although the library itself is never identified by name in the novel. Principal among them was Robert Liddell, nicknamed "Jock" as in the diary entry, who is Dr Nicholas Parnell, the former university friend who comes to stay with the Archdeacon. The other two librarians were Count Roberto Weiss and John Barnicot, who become the novel's Count Ricardo Bianco and his dead friend John Akenside. Two more women also had real-life counterparts. Edith Liversidge was based on Honor Tracy, once Liddell's love interest, while Lady Clara Boulding has been identified with Lady Julia Pakenham, a daughter of the 5th Earl of Longford.

All through her life, Barbara Pym recorded odd names that pleased or amused her – for example, a cathedral organist named A. Surplice. A roman à clef like Some Tame Gazelle gave her full scope for a range of private jokes of that kind. The Bede sisters, who gain excitement from so small a village event as the departure of the vicar's wife watched from behind bedroom curtains, are given the same surname as the ecclesiastical historian, The Venerable Bede. And Dr Theo Grote, who gives slide-lectures on the Mbawawa people, shares his name with George Grote, author of the voluminous History of Greece.

Then, in a novel where so much is made of "our greater poets", the characters bear the name of several. The Augustan poets Thomas Parnell and Matthew Prior give their names to the librarian Dr Parnell and the dressmaker Miss Prior. Other 18th century literary names include Akenside, that of the Count's letter-writing friend, and Piozzi, which was the name given the Count in Pym's original manuscript before the editors at Cape made her change it. Edgar Donne, who pronounces his name as Don, is embarrassed by the Archdeacon's insistence that it should be pronounced like the poet John Donne’s as Dunne. The Archdeacon himself also has a poet's name, that of Thomas Chaucer's disciple Thomas Hoccleve, and quotes both John Gower and Chaucer to an uncomprehending congregation in his sermons. The humour is further underlined by his wife and her niece both being more erudite students of Middle English literature.

Pym's characters sometimes recur in minor roles in later novels. Archdeacon Hoccleve featured in Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings. Harriet Bede reappeared in An Unsuitable Attachment, in which Count Bianco's death is also reported.

Adaptation
Some Tame Gazelle was adapted as a radio play by BBC Radio 4 in 1995 with Miriam Margolyes as Harriet and Hannah Gordon as Belinda.

title: Some Tame Gazelle


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Strangers and Brothers

Strangers and Brothers is a series of novels by C. P. Snow, published between 1940 and 1970. They deal with – among other things – questions of political and personal integrity, and the mechanics of exercising power.

Plot
All eleven novels in the series are narrated by the character Lewis Eliot. The series follows his life and career from humble beginnings in an English provincial town, to reasonably successful London lawyer, to Cambridge don, to wartime service in Whitehall, to senior civil servant and finally retirement.

The New Men deals with the scientific community's involvement in (and reaction to) the development and deployment of nuclear weapons during the Second World War. The Conscience of the Rich concerns a wealthy, Anglo-Jewish merchant-banking family. Time of Hope and George Passant depict the price paid by clever, poor young men to escape their provincial origins.

Snow analyses the professional world, scrutinising microscopic shifts of power within the enclosed settings of a Cambridge college, a Whitehall ministry, a law firm. For example, in the novels set in the Cambridge college (a thinly veiled Christ's), a small, disparate group of men is typically required to reach a collective decision on an important subject. In The Masters, the dozen or so college members elect a new head (the Master) by majority vote. In The Affair, a small group of dons sets out to correct a possible injustice: they must convince the rest of the college to re-open an investigation into scientific fraud. In both novels, the characters strongly resist letting in the external world, whether it be the press, public opinion, the college Visitor, or outside experts.

Narrative order
The narrative order of the books differs from their publication order.

Adaptations
The books were adapted by the BBC into a 13-episode television series, which began airing in January 1984. The series starred Shaughan Seymour as Lewis, Sheila Ruskin as his mentally troubled first wife Sheila and Cherie Lunghi as his second wife Margaret. Other actors who were cast for the series include Anthony Hopkins, Nigel Havers, Peter Sallis and Tom Wilkinson. The series has been released on DVD in the Region 1 and 2 formats.

The BBC later adapted the books as a 10-episode Radio 4 Classic Serial, first broadcast in 2003, which starred Adam Godley (ep.1-5) then David Haig (ep.6-10) as Lewis, Anastasia Hille as Sheila and Juliet Aubrey as Margaret.

title: Strangers and Brothers


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Elizabeth Taylor (novelist)

Elizabeth Taylor (née Coles; 3 July 1912 – 19 November 1975) was an English novelist and short-story writer. Kingsley Amis described her as "one of the best English novelists born in this century". Antonia Fraser called her "one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century", while Hilary Mantel said she was "deft, accomplished and somewhat underrated".

Life and writings
Born in Reading, Berkshire, the daughter of Oliver Coles, an insurance inspector, and his wife Elsie May Fewtrell, Elizabeth was educated at The Abbey School, Reading, and then worked as a governess, tutor and librarian. She married in 1936 John Taylor, owner of a confectionery company, after which they lived in Penn, Buckinghamshire for almost all their married life. She was briefly a member of the British Communist Party, then a consistent Labour Party supporter.

Taylor's first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote's, was published in 1945. It was followed by eleven more. Her short stories were published in magazines and collected in four volumes. She also wrote a children's book. The English critic Philip Hensher called The Soul of Kindness a novel "so expert that it seems effortless. As it progresses, it seems as if the cast are so fully rounded that all the novelist had to do was place them, successively, in one setting after another and observe how they reacted to each other.... The plot... never feels as if it were organised in advance; it feels as if it arises from her characters' mutual responses."

Taylor's work is mainly concerned with the nuances of everyday life and situations. She was a friend of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett and of the novelist and critic Robert Liddell. Her long correspondence with the latter forms the subject of one of her short stories, "The Letter Writers" (published in The Blush, 1951), but the letters were destroyed, in line with her general policy of keeping her private life private. A horror of publicity is the subject of another celebrated short story, "Sisters", written in 1969.

Anne Tyler once compared Taylor to Jane Austen, Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Bowen – "soul sisters all," in Tyler's words.

Taylor was also a close friend of Elizabeth Jane Howard, who was asked by Taylor's widower to write a biography following Elizabeth Taylor's death. Howard refused due to what she felt was a lack of incident in Taylor's life. See Slipstream, Elizabeth Jane Howard's memoir, for more details on their friendship. Taylor's editor at the UK publisher Chatto & Windus was the poet D. J. Enright.

Elizabeth Taylor died of cancer in Penn, Buckinghamshire, at the age of 63.

Perhaps the first film adaption of one of her works was on the television series "Tales of the Unexpected", in September 1980, of the short story "The Flypaper." This broadcast became one of the infamously dark and sinister episodes in British TV history. In the 21st century a new interest in her work was kindled by film-makers. Ruth Sacks Caplin had written a film screenplay based on Taylor's novel Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont in the 1970s, but it languished for decades until her son, Lee Caplin, purchased the rights to the film in 1999. Ruth Sacks Caplin's film adaptation, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, directed by Dan Ireland, was finally released in 2005 with British actress Joan Plowright in the title role.

French director François Ozon made a 2007 film of Angel with Romola Garai.

Novels

 * At Mrs. Lippincote's (1945)
 * Palladian (1946) shows most clearly the influence of Jane Austen.
 * A View of the Harbour (1947)
 * A Wreath of Roses (1949)
 * A Game of Hide and Seek (1951)
 * The Sleeping Beauty (1953)
 * Angel (1957)
 * In a Summer Season (1961) is her most sex-infused work, telling the story of a rich woman who marries a man ten years her junior.
 * The Soul of Kindness (1964)
 * The Wedding Group (1968)
 * Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971). The actress Elizabeth Taylor is probably implied in "the blousy Mrs Burton" coming to stay at the hotel. It was included in Robert McCrum's 100 Best Novels In English. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
 * Blaming (1976), posthumous.

Short story collections

 * Hester Lilly (1954)
 * The Blush and Other Stories (1958)
 * A Dedicated Man and Other Stories (1965)
 * The Devastating Boys (1972). Includes "Sisters" and "Flesh"
 * Dangerous Calm (1995). A selection of her stories and two previously unpublished short stories
 * Complete Short Stories (2012). Collects all of the works in the first five short story collections
 * Elizabeth Taylor: A Centenary Celebration (2012). Short stories uncollected in "Complete Short Stories" including unpublished and incomplete stories, and essays and letters
 * You'll Enjoy It When You Get There: The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor (2014). A selection of her stories.

Short stories

 * "For Thine is the Power", Tribune, 31 March 1944
 * "A Nice Little Actress", Modern Short Stories, August 1944
 * "Better Not", The Adelphi, October–December 1944
 * "A Sad Garden", Modern Reading, March 1945
 * "It Makes a Change", The Adelphi, October–December 1945
 * "Mothers", Here Today, 1945
 * "Husbands and Wives", New Short Stories 1945–1946, ed. John Singer, 1946
 * "Ever So Banal", Kite, Spring 1946
 * "Simone", Writing Today, Summer 1946
 * "The Light of Day", The Harpers Monthly, December 1947
 * "Red-letter Day", The New Yorker, 27 November 1948
 * "First Death of Her Life", The New Yorker, 19 March 1949
 * "After hours of suffering", Vogue, July 1949
 * "The Beginning of a Story", The New Yorker, 29 October 1949
 * "Nods & Becks & Wreathed Smiles", The New Yorker, 19 November 1949
 * "Gravement Endommage", he New Yorker, 7 October 1950
 * "Plenty Good Fiesta", The New Yorker, 14 July 1951
 * "Oasis of Gaiety", The New Yorker, 18 August 1951
 * "The Idea of Age", The New Yorker, 9 February 1952
 * "Spry Old Character", The New Yorker, 7 March 1953
 * "Swan-Moving", The New Yorker, 26 December 1953
 * "Goodbye, Goodbye", The New Yorker, 14 August 1954
 * "Poor Girl", The Third Ghost Book, ed. Cynthia Asquith, 1955
 * "Hare Park", The New Yorker, 14 April 1956
 * "The Ambush", The New Yorker, 2 June 1956
 * "The True Primitive", The New Yorker, 11 May 1957
 * "The Rose, the Mauve, the White", The New Yorker, 22 June 1957
 * "The Blush", The New Yorker, 17 August 1957
 * "You'll Enjoy It When You Get There", The New Yorker, 23 November 1957
 * "A Troubled State of Mind, The Cornhill Magazine, Spring 1958
 * "The Letter-Writers", The New Yorker, 31 May 1958
 * "Perhaps a Family Failing", The New Yorker, 5 July 1958
 * "Summer Schools", The New Yorker, 6 September 1958
 * "The Benefactress", The New Yorker, 5 December 1959
 * "The Thames Spread Out", The New Yorker, 19 December 1959
 * "Thames-Side Venice", The Argosy (UK), May 1960
 * "A Dedicated Man", The New Yorker, 4 June 1960
 * "The Prerogative of Love", The New Yorker, 23 July 1960
 * "Girl Reading", The New Yorker, 29 July 1961; republished in 2023 in Stories of Books and Libraries, edited by Jane Holloway (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 2023)
 * "In a Different Light", The New Yorker, 29 July 1961
 * "As If I Should Care", The New Yorker, 19 May 1962
 * "Mice and Birds and Boy", The New Yorker, 9 February 1963
 * "Mr Wharton", The New Yorker, 8 June 1963
 * "The Voices", The New Yorker, 20 July 1963
 * "In the Sun", The New Yorker, 18 April 1964
 * "Vron and Willie", The New Yorker, 16 January 1965
 * "Setting a Scene", The Cornhill Magazine, Autumn 1965
 * "Hôtel du Commerce", The Cornhill Magazine, Winter 1965/66
 * "The Devastating Boys", McCall's, May 1966
 * "Tall Boy", The New Yorker, 31 December 1966
 * "In and Out the Houses", The Saturday Evening Post, 14 December 1968
 * "The Fly-Paper", The Cornhill Magazine, Spring 1969
 * "Sisters", The New Yorker, 21 June 1969
 * "Well, Here We Are", McCall's, December 1969
 * "The Blossoming", Saturday Book Story, 1972
 * "The Wrong Order", Winters Tale 19, 1972
 * "Madame Olga", McCall's, August 1973

Children's book

 * Mossy Trotter (1967)

title: Elizabeth Taylor (novelist)


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Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys, (born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she mainly resided in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writing.

Early life
Rhys's father, William Rees Williams, was a Welsh medical doctor and her mother, Minna Williams, née Lockhart, a third-generation Dominican Creole of Scots ancestry. ("Creole" was broadly used in those times to refer to any person born on the island, whether they were of European or African descent, or both.) She had a brother. Her mother's family had an estate, a former plantation, on the island.

Rhys was educated in Dominica until the age of 16, when she was sent to England to live with an aunt, as her relations with her mother were difficult. She attended the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, where she was mocked as an outsider and for her accent. She attended two terms at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London by 1909. Her instructors despaired of her ever learning to speak "proper English" and advised her father to take her away. Unable to train as an actress and refusing to return to the Caribbean as her parents wished, Rhys worked with varied success as a chorus girl, adopting the names Vivienne, Emma, or Ella Gray. She toured Britain's small towns and returned to rooming or boarding houses in rundown neighbourhoods of London.

After her father died in 1910, Rhys appears to have experimented with living as an artist's model after she became the mistress of wealthy stockbroker Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, whose father Hugh Colin Smith had been Governor of the Bank of England. Though a bachelor, Smith did not offer to marry Rhys, and their affair soon ended. However, he continued to be an occasional source of financial help. Distraught by events, including a near-fatal abortion, Rhys began writing sketches and short stories.

During the First World War, Rhys served as a volunteer worker in a soldiers' canteen. In 1918, she worked in a pension office to help the families of dead or wonded soldiers and sailors.

Marriage and family
In 1919, Rhys married Willem Johan Marie (Jean) Lenglet, a French-Dutch journalist, spy, and songwriter. He was the first of her three husbands. She and Lenglet lived in Paris, where their baby son died, before living in Vienna and Budapest before returning to Paris. Their daughter was born in 1922. In 1924, the year that the newly named Jean Rhys was discovered and published by Ford Madox Ford, Lenglet was imprisoned for embezzlement. The couple eventually divorced in 1933, but remained loyal to each others' work, while sharing the care of their daughter, Maryvonne.

The next year, Rhys married Leslie Tilden-Smith, an English agent and editor. In 1936, they went briefly to Dominica, the first time Rhys had returned since she had left for school. Her brother Owen was living in England, and she took care of some financial affairs for him, making a settlement with a mixed-race woman on the island and Owen's illegitimate children by her.The visit exerted a powerful influence on Rhys's most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea.

In 1937, Rhys began a friendship with novelist Eliot Bliss (who had adopted that first name in honour of an admired writer). The two women shared Caribbean backgrounds. The correspondence between them survives. Rhys also became close to Phyllis Shand Allfree, whose family also lived in Dominica.

Rhys and Tilden-Smith lived in London through World War II, while Rhys agonised over the possible fate of her daughter, living in Amsterdam. (Maryvonne had joined the Dutch Resistance and married a fellow fighter against Fascism) Tilden-Smith died in 1945. In 1947, Rhys married Max Hamer, a solicitor who was a cousin of Tilden-Smith. He was convicted of fraud and imprisoned after their marriage. Rhys remained admirably loyal to him throughout, while their lives descended into conditions of extreme poverty, including even the hold of a boat and a horsebox. They settled in 1960, in a cottage in Cheriton Fitzpaine, purchased for Rhys by her oldest brother, Edward. Max Hamer died in 1966, the year in which Wide Sargasso Sea began a remarkable change in Rhys' fortunes.

Writing career
In 1924, Rhys came under the influence of English writer Ford Madox Ford. After meeting Ford in Paris, Rhys wrote short stories under his patronage. Ford recognised that her experience as an exile gave Rhys a unique viewpoint, and praised her "singular instinct for form". "Coming from the West Indies, [Ford] declared, 'with a terrifying insight and... passion for stating the case of the underdog, she has let her pen loose on the Left Banks of the Old World'." This he wrote in his preface to her debut short story collection, The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927).

It was Ford who suggested she change her name from Ella Williams to Jean Rhys. At the time her husband was in jail for what Rhys described as currency irregularities. Rhys moved in with Ford and his long-time partner Stella Bowen. An affair with Ford ensued, which she portrayed in fictionalised form in her novel Quartet (1928). Her protagonist is a stranded foreigner, Marya Zelli, who finds herself at the mercy of strangers when her husband is jailed in Paris. The 1981 film adaptation of the novel was produced by Merchant Ivory Productions.

In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), the protagonist, Julia Martin, is a more unravelled version of Marya Zelli, romantically dumped and inhabiting the pavements, cafes and cheap hotel rooms of Paris.

With Voyage in the Dark (1934), Rhys continued to portray a mistreated, rootless woman. Here the narrator, Anna, is a young chorus girl who grew up in the West Indies and feels alienated in England.

Good Morning, Midnight (1939) is sometimes (inaccurately) considered a continuation of Rhys's first two novels. Here, she uses modified stream of consciousness to voice the experiences of an ageing woman, Sasha Jansen, who drinks, takes sleeping pills, and obsesses over her looks, and is adrift again in Paris. Good Morning, Midnight, acknowledged as well written but deemed depressing, came as World War II broke out and readers sought optimism. This seemingly ended Rhys's literary career.

In the 1940s, Rhys largely withdrew from public life. From 1955 to 1960, she lived in Bude, Cornwall, where she was unhappy, calling it "Bude the Obscure", before moving to Cheriton Fitzpaine, a small village in Devon.

After a long absence from the public eye, she was rediscovered in Beckenham, South London, by Selma Vaz Dias, who in 1949 placed an advertisement in the New Statesman asking about her whereabouts, with a view to obtaining the rights to adapt her novel Good Morning, Midnight for radio. Rhys responded, and thereafter developed a long-lasting and collaborative friendship with Vaz Dias, who encouraged her to start writing again. This encouragement ultimately led to the publication in 1966 of her critically acclaimed novel Wide Sargasso Sea. She intended it as an account of the woman whom Rochester married and kept in his attic in Jane Eyre. Begun well before she settled in Bude, the book won the notable WH Smith Literary Award in 1967. She returned to themes of dominance and dependence, especially in marriage, depicting the mutually painful relationship between a privileged English man and a Creole woman from Jamaica made powerless on being duped and coerced by him and others. Both the man and the woman enter marriage under mistaken assumptions about the other partner. Her female lead marries Mr. Rochester and deteriorates in England as the "madwoman in the attic". Rhys portrays this woman from a quite different perspective from the one in Jane Eyre. Diana Athill of André Deutsch gambled on publishing Wide Sargasso Sea. She and the writer Francis Wyndham helped to revive interest in Rhys's work. There have been film, operatic and radio adaptations of the book.

In 1968, André Deutsch published a collection of Rhys' short stories, Tigers Are Better-Looking, of which eight were written during her 1950s period of obscurity and nine republished from her 1927 collection The Left Bank and Other Stories. Her 1969 short story "I Spy a Stranger", published by Penguin Modern Stories, was adapted for TV in 1972 for the BBC's Thirty-Minute Theatre starring Mona Washbourne, Noel Dyson, Hanah Maria Pravda, and Basil Dignam. In 1976, Deutsch published another collection of her short stories, Sleep It Off Lady, consisting of 16 pieces from an approximately 75-year period, starting from the end of the 19th century.

Later years
From 1960, and for the rest of her life, Rhys lived in Cheriton Fitzpaine in Devon that she liked but is unfortunately remembered for having once casually referred to as "a dull spot which even drink can't enliven much." Characteristically, she remained unimpressed by her belated ascent to literary fame, commenting, "It has come too late." In an interview shortly before her death she questioned whether any novelist, not least herself, could ever be happy for any length of time: "If I could choose I would rather be happy than write... if I could live my life all over again, and choose...." Today, she is regarded as one of the greatest of twentieth century writers.

Death
Jean Rhys died in Exeter on 14 May 1979, at the age of 88, before completing an autobiography, which she had begun dictating only months earlier. In 1979, the incomplete text was published posthumously under the title Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography.

Legacy and honours
In an appreciation in the New York Times Book Review in 1974, A. Alvarez called Jean Rhys “quite simply, the best living English novelist".

Jean Rhys was appointed a CBE in the 1978 New Year Honours.

Australian filmmaker John Duigan directed a 1993 erotic drama, Wide Sargasso Sea, based on Rhys's best-known novel.

The 2003 book and stage play After Mrs Rochester by Polly Teale is based on the life of Jean Rhys and her book, Wide Sargasso Sea.

In 2012, English Heritage marked her Chelsea flat at Paulton House in Paultons Square with a blue plaque.

In 2020, a pen allegedly owned by Rhys - a devotee of the ballpoint - was added to the Royal Society of Literature's historic collection for the signing of their Roll Book.

Archives
Rhys's collected papers and ephemera are housed in the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library. The British Library acquired a selection of Jean Rhys Papers in 1972, including drafts of short stories, novels; After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Wide Sargasso Sea, and an unpublished play entitled English Harbour. Research material relating to Jean Rhys can also be found in the Archive of Margaret Ramsey Ltd at the British Library relating to stage and film rights for adaptations to her work. The British Library also holds correspondence between Jean Rhys and Patrick Garland relating to his adaptation of "I Spy a Stranger" and about Quartet.

Selected bibliography

 * The Left Bank and Other Stories, 1927
 * Postures, novel, 1928 (published in the US as Quartet, 1929)
 * After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, novel, 1931
 * Voyage in the Dark, novel, 1934
 * Good Morning, Midnight, novel, 1939
 * Wide Sargasso Sea, novel, 1966
 * Tigers Are Better-Looking: With a Selection from 'The Left Bank' , stories, 1968
 * Penguin Modern Stories 1 (with Bernard Malamud, David Plante, and William Sansom), 1969
 * My Day: Three Pieces, stories, 1975
 * Sleep It Off Lady, stories, 1976
 * Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, 1979
 * Jean Rhys: Letters 1931–1966, 1984
 * Early Novels, 1984
 * The Complete Novels, 1985
 * Tales of the Wide Caribbean, stories, 1985
 * The Collected Short Stories, 1987
 * Let Them Call It Jazz, stories, 1995

title: Jean Rhys


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Talk:Pleasants County, West Virginia

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Translation into Chinese Wikipedia
The 15:37, 30 November 2008 WillC version of this article is translated into Chinese Wikipedia.--Wing (talk) 20:06, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

title: Talk:Pleasants County, West Virginia


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Talk:Pocahontas County, West Virginia

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Section in History re: Civil War
The history section does not adequately explain the transfer of Pocahontas County from Virginia to West Virginia and I want to include a subsection on Civil War battles in the county, soldiers, etc. There is not enough to justify a separate article such as Pocahontas County in the American Civil War. At most about 6-7 paragraphs. Dubyavee (talk) 05:03, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, you don't need permission to add such a section to the article, but if you do, please try to include citations to reliable sources that can be used to verify the information. Published books about the Civil War in West Virginia, and to a lesser extent, local histories of Pocahontas County (both preferably with page references) would be your best bet, although you can (with caution) refer to on-line databases of Civil War soldiers, units, and battles.  Bear in mind that privately-run websites may or may not be considered reliable sources, depending on how they're run and for what purpose; anyone can start a web site about a particular Civil War unit, but that doesn't mean that the information on it is reliable or readily verified.  Don't worry if you make a mistake; mistakes are easily edited and corrected.  If the section does go to six or seven paragraphs, it might well be worth splitting into a separate article.  Many articles on Wikipedia are no longer than that.  But I'd say, write it first, and then we'll see if it fits well where it is, or needs to be split off.  Let me know if you need any help!  P Aculeius (talk) 12:46, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Elizabeth Warren
Should the article state categorically that the county is not named after Elizabeth Warren? 47.137.184.131 (talk) 06:45, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
 * No, of course not. Nobody would logically connect the two.  P Aculeius (talk) 14:39, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

title: Talk:Pocahontas County, West Virginia


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Talk:Preston County, West Virginia

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Links... for Preston County

 * http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/States/54000.html
 * http://www.prestonwv.com
 * http://www.wv.gov
 * http://www.city-data.com/county/Preston-County-WV.html

Requested move 13 October 2020

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Withdrawn. There is also a consensus against this move due to WP:USPLACE anyway (non-admin closure).  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 21:40, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

Preston County, West Virginia → Preston County – Whoever made these articles in 2004 got the redirect backwards - hopefully this is un controversial Lui Khaya (talk) 22:26, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
 * See WP:USPLACE.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 22:35, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. All counties in the U.S. are titled County name, State name. Rreagan007 (talk) 23:01, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose per Rreagan007 and per MOS. The USPLACE is ONLY for cities like New York City or Seattle or Chicago, it can even be used for places like Paris or London or Tokyo.  While, yes, Preston County is the only Preston County in the US, that's not how USPLACE works.  There is, however, an existing redirect at Preston County.  Full disclosure: I have family (Mom and Dad's side) in Preston County. -  Neutralhomer  •  Talk  • 19:20 on October 14, 2020 (UTC) •  #WearAMask • #BlackLivesMatter
 * Oppose per User:Rreagan007 and per MOS:USPLACE. Paintspot Infez (talk) 03:42, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Withdrawn due to snow oppose Lui Khaya (talk) 13:50, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

 * The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

title: Talk:Preston County, West Virginia


text:
Talk:Putnam County, West Virginia

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title: Talk:Putnam County, West Virginia


text:
Talk:Raleigh County, West Virginia

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Good idea
I will start to do that. Of course there are a few other pages that have the County x is a county....

Changes will be done ASAP.

Of note: The Flag for Raleigh County West Virginia has been flying only since 2006. Thats right, it was created in that year. How do I post a pic of this flag?

title: Talk:Raleigh County, West Virginia


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Talk:Randolph County, West Virginia

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Wondering how to edit this U.S. County Entry? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ram-Man (talk • contribs) 16:05, 14 October 2002 (UTC)

The WikiProject U.S. Counties standards might help. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RoryBot (talk • contribs) 14:18, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Looking for information on my,My Grandfather was Joseph Henry Raby
Please any Raby or known associate I'm interested in finding out more about my heritage. My name is Jacqueline Valerie Raby, Daughter of Joseph Henry Raby Jr.I know my grandfather worked on the railroad and also was a miner prior to that.He married a business woman named Mollie,She had many sisters. 2600:6C5E:5F3F:5480:7550:82D9:8850:A8B8 (talk) 15:23, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

 * Unfortunately, this kind of question falls outside our mandate as an encyclopedia. You want a genealogy website, such as familysearch.org (free) or Ancestry.com (subscription, but with some free content).  My advice is to write down all of the facts that people in your family can remember about people's names, dates and places of birth, marriage, death, etc., and then see what you can find.  The West Virginia State Archives has some of the material you could find at county courthouses online.  Some newspapers are also available online, and some of them are searchable, especially for obituaries, which often have the kind of information you're looking for.
 * Wikipedia can tell you about cities, towns, and villages, counties and townships, states and regions. It can tell you about the places where your ancestors lived, and the events that occurred during their lives, and which they might have been involved with.  However, most individuals aren't going to be mentioned in an encyclopedia, so you need to search other sources for things like that.  Good luck!  P Aculeius (talk) 18:26, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Randolph County, West Virginia


text:
Talk:Ritchie County, West Virginia

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title: Talk:Ritchie County, West Virginia


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Talk:Roane County, West Virginia

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title: Talk:Roane County, West Virginia


text:
Talk:Summers County, West Virginia

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title: Talk:Summers County, West Virginia


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Talk:Taylor County, West Virginia

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title: Talk:Taylor County, West Virginia


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Talk:Tucker County, West Virginia

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Template-protected edit request (the adjacent communities template)
Tucker County, WV does not border Garrett County, MD (see https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/dc10map/GUBlock/st24_md/county/c24023_garrett/DC10BLK_C24023_014.pdf ). The template for Garrett County, MD is correct. I fixed the "Adjacent Counties" section in the Wikipedia articles for both counties early this afternoon and then submitted an edit request for the template (the one titled "Places adjacent to Tucker County, West Virginia" under "External links"), but was told in the talk page that I should make the request at the talk page for the article concerned (in other words, here). Kevin Lamoreau (talk) 23:43, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

title: Talk:Tucker County, West Virginia


text:
Talk:Tyler County, West Virginia

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Why does wikipedia want numbers that are extremely unlikely statistically to go unchallenged?
I am talking about the issue with the 1996 Dole votes, and my belief that there was an undercount. I tried adding it twice to this article that there was a likely error. The 1st time, I added it without a source. The 2nd time, I sourced a forum post where this issue was brought up, and most people there agreed that there was likely an error involved. Yet both times were reverted. Honestly, I think its problematic to allow this to happen, so I want to know how we can address the issue. 71.179.173.156 (talk) 15:11, 25 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Please read this section of the "What Wikipedia is not" policy. The first paragraph of Wikipedia's verifiability policy also answers your question: "Wikipedia does not publish original research. Its content is determined by previously published information rather than the beliefs or experiences of editors. Even if you're sure something is true, it must be verifiable before you can add it." Internet forums consist of user-generated content, and do not meet Wikipedia's standards for verifiability. --TimK MSI (talk) 15:49, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

title: Talk:Tyler County, West Virginia


text:
Talk:Upshur County, West Virginia

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title: Talk:Upshur County, West Virginia


text:
Talk:Wayne County, West Virginia

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White Bias
I have attempted a couple of small edits in the history sections to acknowledge that the white settlers weren't the first or best...

title: Talk:Wayne County, West Virginia


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Talk:Webster County, West Virginia

Editing
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title: Talk:Webster County, West Virginia


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List of monasteries dissolved by Henry VIII of England

These monasteries were dissolved by King Henry VIII of England in the dissolution of the monasteries. The list is by no means exhaustive, since over 800 religious houses existed before the Reformation, and virtually every town, of any size, had at least one abbey, priory, convent or friary in it. (Often many small houses of monks, nuns, canons or friars.)


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Mary Renault

Eileen Mary Challans (4 September 1905 – 13 December 1983), known by her pen name Mary Renault, was a British writer best known for her historical novels set in ancient Greece.

Born in Forest Gate in 1905, she attended St Hugh's College, Oxford, from 1924 until 1928. After graduating from St Hugh's with a Third Class in English, she worked as a nurse and began writing her first novels, which were contemporary romances. In 1948, she moved to Durban, South Africa with her partner, Julie Mullard, and later to Cape Town, where she spent the rest of her life. Living in South Africa allowed her to write about openly gay characters without fearing the censorship and homophobia of England. She devoted herself to writing historical fiction in the 1950s, which were also her most successful books. She is best known for her historical fiction today.

Renault's works are often rooted in themes related to love, sexuality and relationships. Her books attracted a large gay following at the time of their publication, when few mainstream works depicted homosexuality in a positive light. Her work has had a generally positive reception by critics. She has received numerous awards and honours, both during her lifetime and posthumously.

Youth and education
Eileen Mary Challans was born on 4 September 1905 at Dacre Lodge, 49 Plashet Road, Forest Gate, Essex. She was the elder daughter of physician Frank Challans and (Mary) Clementine Newsome, daughter of dentist John Baxter, who claimed descent from the Puritan church leader Richard Baxter. Her mother was "a desperately aspirational housewife, whose favourite word was 'nice'". She had one younger sister, (Frances) Joyce, who Challans always felt was the favourite daughter. She had a comfortable, yet strained childhood; her parents had a contentious relationship, and her father was neglectful of his children. When she was 15, her mother's sister Bertha paid for her to be sent to a boarding school in Bristol, and then to attend the University of Oxford. As a result of entering boarding school later than most of her peers, Challans struggled to catch up in mathematics and Latin. She relied on the Loeb Classical Library to read Greek and Latin texts with English translation.

Challans was educated first at Levick Family School and Clifton Girls School in Bristol. She began attending St Hugh's College, Oxford, then an all-women's college, in 1924. While at St Hugh's, she studied history, mythology, philosophy and ancient literature. Although her studies included classical languages such as Latin, her Ancient Greek language skills were self taught. She graduated with an undergraduate degree in English in 1928. One of her tutors was J.R.R. Tolkien, who encouraged her to write a novel set in medieval times, but she burned the manuscript because she felt it lacked authenticity.

Nursing and early writing
Challans' mother encouraged her to take an interest in marriage. Following her degree, when her father refused to support her career as a writer, she left home and, to support herself, trained as a nurse. She began her training in 1933 at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. During her training she met Julie Mullard, a fellow nurse with whom she established a lifelong romantic relationship. Despite the mores of the time and the fact that Mullard had received an offer of marriage from one of her male lovers, they were determined to be a couple. They snuck into each other's rooms at night, and on one occasion had to hide beneath the sheets when a matron burst in.

Challans worked as a nurse while writing her first novel, Purposes of Love, using the pseudonym Mary Renault to keep her writing secret should it meet with disapproval. She chose this pseudonym from Froissart's Chronicles and used it for the entirety of her professional literary career. The novel was published in 1939 by Longman in the United Kingdom, and by William Morrow and Company in the United States. After receiving a cash advance from Morrow, Challans bought an MG sports car. Although Challans had failed her driving test, she decided to drive the car anyway along with Mullard, who also did not have a driving licence. They were involved in a road traffic accident in June 1939 which seriously injured Mullard, who was hospitalized for facial injuries. A few weeks later, the two women retreated to a small cottage in Cornwall where they lived off the income from Purposes of Love. Challans had nearly completed her second novel when World War II began. By May 1940, both Challans and Mullard had been called in to treat patients at Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol. There, they briefly treated evacuees from the Battle of Dunkirk. Renault worked in the Radcliffe Infirmary's brain surgery ward until 1945.

Her novel The Friendly Young Ladies (1943), about a lesbian relationship between a writer and a nurse, is thought to be inspired by her relationship with Mullard. It is the only lesbian novel written by Renault.

Academic and writing career
In 1948, after winning an MGM prize worth £37,000 for Return to Night, Challans was able to leave nursing and devote herself to writing full time. Challans and Mullard emigrated to Durban, South Africa, which was home to a community of gay and lesbian expatriates who had left the more sexually repressive environments of Britain and the United States. Because of this, Challans and Mullard were able to live together as a couple without causing much controversy. Challans worked successfully as an author after the couple's arrival in South Africa in 1948, and continued to write until her death in 1983. In 1964, she became president of the South African chapter of International PEN, an association of writers, a position which she held until 1981. Both women were critical of the less liberal aspects of their new home, and participated in the Black Sash movement against apartheid in the 1950s. However, Challans was occasionally disillusioned with the Black Sash on account of its insufficiently radical leanings, such as when it refused to protest against the implementation of anti-homosexuality laws in 1968.

Challans travelled in Africa, Greece and Crete, but never returned to Britain. She had a mutual admiration for the novelist Patrick O'Brian, with whom she exchanged letters. Her earlier British reputation as a writer of sensationalist bestsellers faded, and in 1983 she was listed as one of the famous alumnae who had brought honour to the Radcliffe Infirmary Nurses' Home. Challans became ill in August 1983, and was diagnosed with lung cancer and pneumonia. In her final days she tried to complete a final novel, which remained unfinished after she went into residential hospice care. She died in Cape Town on 13 December 1983.

Chronology of writing
Beginning with Purposes of Love, Challans' first six novels had a contemporary setting. She published Return to Night in 1947. This was followed by The North Face in 1948.

Challans' last contemporary romance novel, The Charioteer (1953), marked a change in theme. It tells the story of two young gay servicemen in the 1940s who try to model their relationship on the ideals expressed in Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium. It echoed themes which Challans later revisited with her historical novels.

Between 1956 and 1981, Challans turned to historical fiction, all of which was set in ancient Greece. Challans, by then in her mid-fifties, made her first foray into historical fiction with The Last of the Wine. The novel was her greatest financial and critical success to date, and she followed it with several other historical novels. Her historical novels include a pair of novels about the mythological hero Theseus and a trilogy about the career of Alexander the Great.

Relationships
A central theme in Challans' work, both contemporary and historical, is the presentation of love as a struggle between the pursuer and the pursued. This dynamic was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Plato, in particular Phaedrus, his dialogue on love. Hierarchical relationships, involving age gaps or differences in social status, are frequently explored in Challans' novels. In her novels featuring same-sex couples, these hierarchies serve as an alternative to traditional gender roles. Fire from Heaven centres on the relationship between Alexander and his lover Hephaestion, while The Persian Boy is about the relationship between the enslaved Bagoas and Alexander. The novelist Linda Proud described Purposes of Love as "a strange combination of Platonism and hospital romance". Challans' Return to Night, another hospital romance, explores the power dynamics between Hillary, a doctor, and a younger man with whom she has an affair.

Sexuality
Many of Challans' contemporary romance novels explored same-sex love and desire through their characters. For example, Colanna, an openly lesbian character, features in Purposes of Love. The Charioteer has been noted as an early example of the "Gay novel". It was written during a period of time when male homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom, particularly under the policies implemented by David Maxwell Fyfe, 1st Earl of Kilmuir, who was Home Secretary from 1951 to 1954. Simon Russell Beale described its contemporary context as "that sombre, twilit world of the early 1950s, when so much of homosexual life was threaded through with fear of exposure." The protagonists of the novel, Ralph and Laurie, look to Greek ideals as a template for how to understand their own masculinity and homosexuality. The society of Classical Greece acts as a more tolerant and liberating alternative to contemporary British society.

Challans' American publishers refused to publish The Charioteer for fear of prosecution. Renault attributed this hesitancy to the rise of McCarthyism in the United States. It was not published in the United States until 1959, which made it a somewhat later addition to homosexual literature in the United States because American readers and critics had accepted serious gay love stories in such works as Djuna Barnes' Nightwood (1936), Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar (1948).

Her Alexander Trilogy was one of the first mainstream literary works to feature homosexual relationships prominently. By turning away from the twentieth century and writing stories about male lovers in the warrior societies of ancient Greece, Renault no longer had to deal with homosexuality and anti-gay prejudice as social "problems". Instead, she was free to consider larger ethical and philosophical concerns while examining the nature of love and leadership.

Role of women
Women do not play a large role in Challans' historical fiction, and are relegated to the role of wives and mothers. They often behave in stereotypical ways, being simultaneously helpless and ruthless. Critics have remarked on the negative portrayal of women, particularly mothers, in her work. This is often attributed to the fraught relationship Challans had with her own mother. David Sweetman remarks in his biography of Challans that her novels generally portray mothers in a poor light and that, particularly in her later novels, this is extended to women in general. Daniel Mendelsohn said that both her "contemporary and the Greek novels feature unsettling depictions of bad marriages and, particularly, of nightmarishly passive-aggressive wives and mothers." Her generally negative depiction of women has also been noted by the critic Carolyn Gold Heilbrun.

Views
Challans was a Platonist, which influenced her personal views on love and relationships.

Gay liberation
Though Challans appreciated her gay following, she was uncomfortable with the "gay pride" movement that emerged in the 1970s after the Stonewall riots, and she was reluctant to identify as a lesbian. Like Laurie Odell, the protagonist of The Charioteer, she was suspicious of identifying oneself primarily by one's sexual orientation. Late in her life she expressed hostility to the gay rights movement, troubling some of her fans. Her views on the gay rights movement were elaborated upon in an afterword to The Friendly Ladies written shortly before her death in 1983. "Congregated homosexuals waving banners are really not conducive to a goodnatured 'Vive la difference!' ... People who do not consider themselves to be, primarily, human beings amongst their fellow humans, deserve to be discriminated against, and ought not to make a meal of it."

Apartheid
After relocating to South Africa in the late 1940s, Challans was involved in the anti-apartheid movement, although not as actively as many of her contemporaries. In a 1979 interview, Challans said that although she signed petitions and written protests against apartheid, she did not "pass [herself] off as a heroine. You don't get locked up for writing protests." According to Challans, she did not feel strongly compelled to write about apartheid in her novels because it made no major impact on her life, saying "I have never profited from apartheid and I have never been segregated."

Reception
Challans' work was generally well received during her lifetime, and has enjoyed a continuously positive reception in retrospective reviews. The historian Tom Holland said that "No other novelist has so successfully evoked the beauty, the charisma and the terror of ancient Greece." Peter Parker of The Telegraph, described The Charioteer as a "classic" in a 2014 review. Her novels, both historical and contemporary, have been republished by Virago.

Fire from Heaven, her novel about Alexander the Great, was one of the six books shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010.

Noël Coward's reception of Challans' work and her portrayal of homosexual relationships in particular was less warm:

"I have also read The Charioteer by Miss Mary Renault. Oh dear, I do, do wish well-intentioned ladies would not write books about homosexuality. This one is turgid, unreal and so ghastly earnest. It takes the hero – soi-disant – three hundred pages to reconcile himself to being queer as a coot, and his soul-searching and deep, deep introspection is truly awful. There are 'queer' parties in which everyone calls everyone 'my dear' a good deal, and over the whole book is a shimmering lack of understanding of the subject. I'm sure the poor woman meant well but I wish she'd stick to recreating the glory that was Greece and not fuck about with dear old modern homos."

Historical accuracy
Although not a classicist by training, Challans was admired in her day for her scrupulous recreations of the ancient Greek world. Her work was critically acclaimed for the meticulously researched historical detail she included. Some of the history presented in her fiction and in her non-fiction work, The Nature of Alexander, has been called into question, however. Her novels about Theseus rely on the controversial theories of Robert Graves, and take liberties in depicting the society of ancient Crete. Mary Beard and John Henderson observed Challans' novels create "in mythical prehistoric Crete [...] a weird 'other world', where a society free from 'our' inhibitions (particularly sexual) can be realized."

Some of her portrayals of individual historical figures have also been criticized. Her portrait of Alexander has been criticized as uncritical and romanticised. Kevin Kopelson, Professor of English at the University of Iowa, felt that Challans "mischaracterise[d] pederastic relationships as heroic." Defying centuries of admiration for Demosthenes as a great orator, Challans portrayed him as a cruel, corrupt and cowardly demagogue.

Legacy and influence
Challans' work drew a wide readership. When asked who his favourite author was, John F. Kennedy replied "Mary Renault".

At the time they were published, Challans' works were among the few novels to present love between persons of the same sex as a natural part of life, rather than a problem. Daniel Mendelsohn discussed the impact that Challans' work, and their correspondences, had on him as young boy. The Charioteer has been described as "a historical gay document", providing guidance and comfort to gay men through classical literature in an essentially hostile world. Her sympathetic treatment of love between men won her a wide gay readership, and led to rumours that Challans was a gay man writing under a female pseudonym. Challans found these rumours amusing but also sought to distance herself from being labelled a "gay writer".

Challans' work has influenced historical fiction and classical literature. The historian Bettany Hughes credited Renault with capturing the "hardcore, drug-saturated sensuality of the ancient world." Hughes later wrote the introduction to reprints of her work, including The King Must Die and The Bull From the Sea.

She has been cited as an inspiration by novelists such as Douglas Stuart and Kate Forsyth. Suzanne Collins said that The Hunger Games was partly inspired by The King Must Die, which reimagined Minos' Labyrinth as an arena where Athenian tributes had to fight for their lives to entertain the Cretan elite.

Bernard Dick wrote The Hellenism of Mary Renault (1972), which analyzed the classical influences reflected in her corpus of work. Dick corresponded with Challans from 1969 until her death in 1983. The letters were eventually donated to the St Hugh's College archive, which also holds other letters and transcriptions of interviews with Challans before her death.

An hour-long documentary about her life titled Mary Renault – Love and War in Ancient Greece was aired on BBC Four in 2006. The documentary included contributions from Hughes, filmmaker Oliver Stone, and broadcaster Sue MacGregor. The Mary Renault Prize is offered at St Hugh's College, Challans' alma mater. It awards cash prizes to the best essays on the Classical reception, funded by royalties from Challans' work.

Adaptations of her work
The King Must Die and its sequel The Bull from the Sea were adapted by Michael Bakewell into a single 11-part BBC Radio 4 serial entitled The King Must Die. It was directed by David Spenser and broadcast between 5 June 1983 and 14 August 1983. It starred Gary Bond (Theseus), John Westbrook (Pittheus), Frances Jeater (queen of Eleusis), Carole Boyd (Aithra), Alex Jennings (Amyntor), Sarah Badel, David March and Christopher Guard.

The Charioteer was adapted into a ten-episode serial for BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime, read by Anton Lesser and produced by Clive Brill, which was broadcast over two weeks from 25 November 2013.

Contemporary fiction

 * Purposes of Love (1939) (US title: Promise of Love)
 * Kind Are Her Answers (1940)
 * The Friendly Young Ladies (1944) It was published in the US as The Middle Mist, 1945
 * Return to Night (1947) A French translation was published in Paris in 1948 by A. Michel, under the title "Recours à la nuit".
 * The North Face (1948) (US 1949)
 * The Charioteer (1953) (US 1959) The Charioteer was published in Spanish in 1989 – translated by María José Rodellar – with the title El Auriga, and into Greek in 1990 with the title Hō eniochos.

Historical novels

 * The Last of the Wine (1956) — set in Athens during the Peloponnesian War; the narrator is a student of Socrates
 * The King Must Die (1958) — the mythical Theseus up to his father's death
 * The Bull from the Sea (1962) — the remainder of Theseus' life
 * The Mask of Apollo (1966) — an actor at the time of Plato and Dionysius the Younger (brief appearance by Alexander near the end of the book)
 * Fire from Heaven (1969) — Alexander the Great from the age of four up to his father's death
 * The Persian Boy (1972) — from Bagoas' perspective; Alexander the Great after the conquest of Persia
 * The Praise Singer (1978) — the poet Simonides of Ceos (UK 1979)
 * Funeral Games (1981) — Alexander's successors

Non-fiction

 * The Lion in the Gateway: The Heroic Battles of the Greeks and Persians at Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae (1964) — about the Persian Wars
 * The Nature of Alexander (1975) — a biography of Alexander the Great

title: Mary Renault