SEPTEMBER

I HAVE A DREAM SPEECH

"I Have a Dream" is a public speech delivered by American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 28 August 1963, in which he called for an end to racism in the United States and called for civil and economic rights. Delivered to over 250,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the speech was a decisive moment of the American Civil Rights Movement. 

A DEVASTATING AND HEARTBREAKING EARTHQUAKE

The earthquake that struck central Italy in the early hours of Wednesday has killed almost 300 people. Among scenes of devastation, dozens of emergency services staff and volunteers have been working night and day in the hope of finding people alive in the mangled wreckage of homes in demolished towns.

The earthquake was powerful enough to be felt in Bologna to the north and Naples to the south, both more than 220 km (135 miles) from the epicentre.

Here you can read Beppe Severgnini's article about "Italy's fragile beauty".

THE SECRET GARDEN

"The Secret Garden"  is a novel by  Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was initially published in serial format beginning in 1910, and was first published in its entirety in 1911.

It is now one of Frances Hodgson Burnett's most popular novels, and is considered to be a classic of English children's literature. 

Here you can find a simplified version of the novel and some activity worksheets here .

Click here to read a book review. Here you can find a  detailed analysis of the novel.

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

Thomas Hardy  was born on 2 June 1840 in the county of Dorset. His father was a stonemason and his mother educated him until age eight. His family was too poor to pay for university, so he became an architect's apprentice until he decided to focus on writing. His stories are generally set in the Dorset area. In 1874 he married Emma Gifford, and her death in 1912 had a profound effect on him. In 1914 he married his secretary, Florence Dugdale. His first few novels were unsuccessful, and even his later works were controversial and often censored. Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure drew strong disapproval  for their sexual frankness and social criticism that Hardy stopped writing fiction, focusing instead on his poetry. He is best known for Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. He died in 1928, at the age of eighty-seven.

Virginia Woolf  noted some of Thomas Hardy’s enduring power as a writer: “Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul.”

AUGUST

THE LAST SONG

Based on Nicholas Sparks' best-selling novel, The Last Song is set in a small Southern beach town where a separated father gets a chance to spend the summer with his unenthusiastic teenage daughter, who would rather be at home in New York. He tries to reconnect with her through the only thing they have in common,  music.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EMILY BRONTË!

Emily Brontë was born on 30th July 1818, the 5th child of the Reverend Patrick Brontë, a stern Evangelical curate, and his wife Maria. When Emily was three years old, her mother died of cancer, and her Aunt Branwell, a strict Calvinist, moved in to help raise the six children (another daughter, Anne, was born soon after Emily). They lived in a parsonage in Haworth with the bleak moors of Yorkshire on one side and the parish graveyard on the other. 
Continue reading  here.

“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Healthcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.” 
Emily Brontë, "Wuthering Heights"

HOMOPHONES AND HOMONYMS

ENGLISH VOCABULARY TRAINING

Here you can find tons of exercises to help you learn English words and expressions. 

http://www.learnenglish.de/vocabpage.html

http://learnersdictionary.com/3000-words

http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/grammar-and-vocabulary

REVISING THE FUTURE

REVISING JANE EYRE

Jane Eyre was Charlotte Brontë’s second novel, but the first to be published. The first, The Professor, was rejected several times  by the publishers and was published posthumously. Jane Eyre, on the other hand, was accepted at once, favourably reviewed and recognised as something new in English fiction  -  it used traditional conventions in a very personal way. The strong autobiographical element is what typifies all her work and this novel in particular. In fact, Charlotte Brontë’s  fiction is best understood in the light of her personal background, as it is essentially  the expression of her passionate  temper and the imaginary world  in which  she lived.  The first-person  narrator, who in 18^th-century fiction was used to add the realism of narration, is used by Charlotte Brontë  to convey  personal feelings  in order that the narrator becomes directly identified with the author. This accounts  for the emotional use of language and reveals the strength of Charlotte Brontë’s feelings and her interest in the nature  of human relationships. She also employed Gothic conventions in a personal way, not just for the sake of arousing  a sense  of horror, but as a means of evoking feelings. The handling of nature  serves the same purpose.  The emotional use of  language, the symbolic handling of nature and the projection of personal feelings are features typical of Romantic poetry, but they appear  for the first time in serious  fiction  in the novels of  Charlotte Brontë. The Romantic aspect is also evident in the male protagonist of Jane Eyre  -  Rochester is a typical Byronic hero. Despite his stern manner and not particularly handsome appearance, he is very attractive to women, but restless and moody and with something mysterious about his past. 

You can read The Guardian review here.
Here you can read the novel.

https://webtv.loescher.it/home/zoomPublic?contentId=1682921

"Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags."

Charlotte Brontë

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH!

Happy birthday to Benedict Cumberbatch, who turns 40 today.  Read here.

COMMEMORATING JANE AUSTEN

Jane Austen died on 18 July 1817, after a long illness. She spent the last weeks of her life in Winchester and is buried in the cathedral there.

Here you can read a lovely post about a visit to Jane Austen's House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire … unfortunately I still haven’t had the chance of going there!  Maybe some day …

Here you can find another interesting post about Jane Austen in Winchester.

JULY

"To see the Summer Sky

Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie  -

True Poems flee"

Emily Dickinson