HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LOUISA MAY ALCOTT!

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 29, 1832. She was an American novelist best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Her family suffered from financial difficulties, and while she worked to help support the family from an early age, she also sought an outlet in writing. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote novels for young adults that focused on spies, revenge, and cross dressers.

Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts, and is loosely based on Louisa May Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today, filmed several times.

She was an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried throughout her life. She died from a stroke in Boston on March 6, 1888.

Here you can read an interesting article about Little Women, a treasured American classic and peerless coming-of-age story for girls. 

PRACTISING ENGLISH LISTENING SKILLS - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Test your level of English 

Cambridge English: Preliminary  (PET)

Intermediate  B1 listening

Upper IntermediateB2  listening

B2 Listening tests

Cambridge English: First (FCE)

Advanced C1 listening 

OPPOSITE ADJECTIVES - 1^C LINGUISTICO

Here you can find sentences which contain examples of adjectives. They are in pairs that contain adjectives that are opposite to each other.

Here there is a list of opposites of some adjectives for beginners.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Here you can find an interesting Thanksgiving lesson.

SIMPLE PAST TENSE - 1^C LINGUISTICO

LET'S SING TOGETHER! - 1^C LINGUISTICO

REPORTED SPEECH - 3^C LINGUISTICO

Here you can revise reported speech.

JANE AUSTEN - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Here and here you can revise Jane Austen and her  novels which have a unique and subtle charm, with an unprecedented mixture of sharpness, irony, wit and wisdom. 

Here you can find a PDF presentation.

Here you can discover  the Jane Austen Centre in Bath ... I was there last April! Simply spellbinding!

ELIZABETH GASKELL, A VICTORIAN NOVELIST

Elizabeth Gaskell was a Victorian novelist whose masterpieces, “Mary Barton”, which was first published anonymously, and “North and South”, are vivid accounts of poverty in Manchester and reflect her political foresight in the changing Industrial Age. She is much-loved by readers and fans of costume drama, and she is regarded as a daring pioneer, determined to speak out against injustice. 
Unlike the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell was fiercely and explicitly concerned with the present and its problems. Her novels sit alongside those by Charles Dickens: works written in the mid-nineteenth-century that portrayed relations between rich and poor in a country transformed by industrialisation. Though this transformation had begun several decades earlier, it attracted renewed attention because of a severe economic depression in the eighteen-forties and a resulting increase in the spread and depth of urban poverty.

She died on 12 November 1865, when she was just 55.

“North and South”

“Mary Barton”

Elizabeth Gaskell & Jane Austen

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY

On the 11th hour of the 11th day, November 1918, the guns of World War I fell silent and four bloody years of brutal conflict came to an end. Read here.

“When you go home

Tell them of us

and say

For your tomorrow

We gave our today.”

John Maxwell Edmunds

PREPOSITIONS OF TIME AND PLACE - 1^C LINGUISTICO

EDGAR ALLAN POE’S “THE TELL-TALE HEART” - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Obsessed with the vulture-like eye of an old man he otherwise loves and trusts, the narrator smothers the old man, dismembers his body, and conceals the parts under the floorboards of the bedroom. When the police arrive to investigate reports of the old man’s shrieks, the narrator attempts to keep his cool, but hears what he thinks is the beating of the old man’s heart. Panicking, afraid that the police know his secret, he rips up the floorboards and confesses his crime.

Here you can read Edgar Allan Poe's short story.

Here you can find a detailed analysis of this Gothic tale.

NOVEMBER

"When the trees their summer splendor

Change to raiment red and gold,

When the summer moon turns mellow,

And the nights are getting cold;
When the squirrels hide their acorns
And the woodchucks disappear;
Then we know that it is autumn,
Loveliest season of the year."
Carol L. Riser