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Gone with the wind	Jane Eyre	La Dame Aux Camilias

Before reading....

These three books are the novels i like best among Westen Works.Here are some excerption i choose from the novel. If you are interested about novels,just lick the novel's cover.

Hope you Enjoy it!

Gone With The Wind Memorable Moments from Great Movies! Great Moments and Scenes from Memorable Movies! Great Lines and Quotes from the Movies! Great Movies with Great Dialogue! Great Stars and Great Characters in Great Moments from Great Movies! The most beloved, enduring and popular film of all time is Gone With The Wind (1939) - its script by Sidney Howard was derived from Margaret Mitchell's first and only published, best-selling Civil War and Reconstruction Period novel of over 1,000 pages that first appeared in 1936. Producer David O. Selznick had acquired the film rights to Mitchell's novel for $50,000 - a record amount at the time. At the time of the film's release, the book had surpassed 1.5 million copies sold. More records were set when the film was first aired on television in two parts in late 1976, and controversy arose when it was restored and released theatrically in 1998. The famous film, shot in three-strip Technicolor, is cinema's greatest, star-studded, historical epic film that boasts an immortal cast in a timeless, classic tale of a love-hate romance and war. The indomitable heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, struggles to find love during the Civil War years and afterwards, and ultimately seeks refuge for herself and her family at the beloved plantation Tara. With three years advance publicity, three and one-half hours running time, a gala premiere in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, highest-grossing film status, and Max Steiner's sweeping musical score, the exquisitely photographed Technicolor film was a blockbuster in its own time. It totaled over 4 million dollars in production costs - an enormous, record-breaking sum. A nationwide casting search for an actress to play the Southern belle Scarlett resulted in the hiring of British actress Vivien Leigh, although many other famous actresses had been tested including: Katharine Hepburn, Miriam Hopkins, Margaret Sullavan, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Mae West, Tallulah Bankhead, Jean Arthur, and Lucille Ball. Although Clark Gable was expected to play the role of the dashing war profiteer Rhett Butler, Errol Flynn, Ronald Colman, and Gary Cooper were also considered for the part. The film received tremendous accolades, more than any previous films to date: thirteen nominations and eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Victor Fleming - the only credited director), Best Actress (Vivien Leigh), a posthumous Best Screenplay (Sidney Howard, along with assistance from Edwin Justin Mayer, John Van Druten, Ben Hecht, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jo Swerling), Best Color Cinematography, Best Interior Decoration, Best Film Editing, and Best Supporting Actress (Hattie McDaniel - the first time an African-American had been nominated and honored) and two honorary plaques, one for production designer William Cameron Menzies for the "use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood," and the other a technical production award for Don Musgrave for "pioneering in the use of coordinated equipment." Many of the five nominations that lost were unexpected: Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Supporting Actress (Olivia de Havilland), Best Sound Recording, Best Original Score (Max Steiner), and Best Special Effects. Although almost half of the film was directed by Victor Fleming (45%), four other directors contributed various parts of the film: Sam Wood (15%), William Cameron Menzies (15%), George Cukor (5%), Reeves Eason (2%), and the remaining from various second unit directors (18%). Its record of ten Academy Awards wins held firm until 1959, when Ben-Hur (1959) won eleven Oscars. In the opening credits, producer David Selznick's name appears: "Selznick International In Association with Metro-Goldwyn Mayer has the Honor to Present its Technicolor production of Margaret Mitchell's Story of the Old South." The title of the film "GONE WITH THE WIND" is displayed in gigantic, majestic words, each one individually sweeping across the screen from right to left above a red-hued sunset. As the titles and credits play, carefully-selected images of the Old South are portrayed as backgrounds - a green pasture with horses grazing, a river at night, magnolias, a mill constructed from bricks, slaves working in the fields, peaceful Southern plantations, the city of Atlanta, and a sunset. The film extends over a time period of twelve years in the life of plantation belle Scarlett O'Hara, from the start of the Civil War through the Reconstruction Period, and covers her various romantic pursuits against the backdrop of historical events. The fanciful, introductory foreword to the film explains: There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind...

JANE EYRE.The character of Charlotte Bronte's second novel, was advertised from the outset by its subtitle, "An Autobiography," and was received as such by its first critics. Blackwood's reviewer (October 1848) said that it was "a pathetic tale, so like the truth that it si difficult to avoid believing that many of the characters and incidents are take from life." G.H. Lewes found the same thing: "Reality--deep significant reality, is the characteristic of this book . . . . " In JANE EYRE the author gathered together not merely the recent experiences of her adult years, but the unobliterated recollections of childhood at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge. Confined as that experience had in reality been to a period of ten months in the author's ninth year, it is given a duration and a prominence in the novel that cast its shadow over all the subsequent action. Jane Eyre, the heroine, is essentially a "deprived child," a penniless orphan whose isolation in an inimical world makes her doubly vulnerable to its indifference and cruelty. It also makes her doubly responsive to the least proffer of friendship and love. At the orphanage the child forms a passionate attachment to an older and precociously intelligent girl, HELEN BURNS (whose prototype was Charlotte's own eldest sister, Maria, who died of tuberculosis at thirteen), because Helen is good to her. It is also so with the school superintendent, MISS EVANS, who treats Jane with justice and confidence in her ability to make good. Normal human relationships based on mutual trust and humanity take a disproportionate place in Jane's affections, because of the traumatic experiences of her childhood. This point is made manifestly clear by the author before engaging her heroine in the vortex of her love for her employer, Mr. Rochester.With the figure of the master/lover, EDWARD ROCHESTER, Charlotte reached the parting of the ways between the early obsessive dream creation of her Angrian chronicles and the experience of real life. Rochester is invested with the conflicting attributes of the real-life Belgian professor, Constantine Heger, whom Charlotte had loved, and much of the Byronic swagger of the imaginary Zamorna. With Rochester, Zamorna makes his last appearance in Charlotte Brontes writing, and it is a notable one. The romantic ideal of Zamorna, conceived in girlhood and evolved for over ten years throughout a voluminous literary output, died hard with its author just because of her unrealized love for her Belgian professor. Zamorna was there, ever present, in her mind, in compensation for the deprivation of her lot. For two-thirds of Jane Eyre it is Zamorna/Rochester who sustains the plot; without the strong element of Zamorna in the character, which accounts for his French liaisons and his illegitimate daughter (just as in "Caroline Vernon," where the selfsame situation exists), there could have been no attempted seduction of the innocent Jane Eyre and the tale would have lost both its drama and its moral significance, which rests on her rejection of dishonor. The seduction theme had figured twice before in Charlotte's novelettes, written in her early twenties, and had been treated there in two conflicting ways. Caroline Vernon, barely sixteen, was shown as succumbing with rapture to seduction by Zamorna and being ruined in consequence. The far more mature Elizabeth Hastins is shown as rejecting the dishonorable proposals of Sir William Percy. The fact that she loved him and had no alternative prospect in life but hard work and loneliness turned her rejection into a moral victory. At no age was Charlotte Bronte a moral prig (especially not in her early twenties) and the reasons she gave for Elizabeth's decisions were not, she made abundantly clear, so much out of virtue as out of self-respect. "I'll never be your mistress," she answers Sir William, "I could not without incurring the miseries of self-hatred .. . ."

La Dame aux Camelias : The World's Classics (Oxford), translated and introduced by David Coward, 1986. I don't know if it is still in print, I bought it at a second hand book store. David Coward's notes might be actually more interesting than the book itself. The introduction, the chronology of Dumas Fils and the explanatory notes are full of information on lives of Dumas Fils and Marie Duplessis (n¨¦e Alphonsine Plessis) who are the real life counterparts of Armand Duval and Marguerite, respectively. This is what David Coward says in his introduction: La Dame aux Camelias has never been a novel for which persons of taste and discernment have been able to confess outright enthusiasm. When it appeared in 1848, stern judges declared its subject to be indelicate. Nowadays the blushes spring from a reluctance to admit openly that a four-hankie novel can claim to be literature or even have a serious call on our attention. By any standards, it is not a particularly good book: at most, it falls into G.K. Chesterton's category of `good bad books'... [Dumas Fils] wrote better novels and more significant plays, but he wrote them with his head. La Dame aux Cam¨¦lias is a young man's book, and it has all the faults and virtues of youth. It was a romantic indiscretion for which Dumas was never moved to apologize. Real life of Marie Duplessis is far more interesting than her life as Marguerite on pages. She was Dumas' mistress for eleven months, between September 1844 and August 1845. After they broke up, she met Liszt and they fell in love with one another. `She was the most absolute incarnation of Woman who has never existed' he wrote afterwards. Liszt, and not Dumas, appears to have been the only man Marie Duplessis genuinely loved. Marie Duplessis (Alphonsine Plessis) was born in 1824. Her father started offering her to men by the time she was twelve. By sixteen she was one of the most celebrated courtesans of her day. Also at sixteen she learned to read and write and by the time of her death in 1847, at the age of twenty-three, she owned 200 books, Manon Lescaut amongst them, which Dumas uses to start his story with. David Coward connects the fiction to the facts with scrupulous footnotes. If you can find it, read his rendition. If you can't find it, then read whatever version you can find, it is a good story. After all, who wouldn't want to read the story of the woman who is the heroine of Verdi's La Traviata? I only wish Armand Duval didn't cry so much. I give this book 4 hearts, I took one away for the four-hankie effect.