Now Voyager

The iconic American melodrama that inspired the 1943 cult classic film starring Bette Davis. “Charlotte Vale a timeless and very sophisticated Cinderella.” —Patricia Gaffney, New York Times bestselling author “Don’t let’s ask for the moon! We have the stars!” The film Now, Voyager concludes with these famous words, which reaffirmed Bette Davis’s own stardom and changed the way Americans smoked cigarettes. But few fans of this rich story know its source. Olive Higgins Prouty’s 1941 novel provides a rich, complex portrait of the inner life of its protagonist and the society she inhabits. Over half a century later, it still offers fresh and quietly radical takes on psychiatric treatment, traditional family life, female desire, and women’s agency. Boston blueblood Charlotte Vale has led an unhappy, sheltered life. Dowdy, repressed, and pushing forty, Charlotte finds salvation in the unlikely form of a nervous breakdown, placing her at a sanitarium, where she undergoes treatment to rebuild her ravaged self-esteem and uncover her true intelligence and charm. Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era. “Like the film it inspired, Olive Higgins Prouty’s Now, Voyager is as striking for the conventions it bucks as for the ones it embraces: a vivid reminder of a time when people crossed the ocean in liners and wore hats, and a hymn to an American ideal of social, moral, and emotional independence.” —David Leavitt, author of Shelter in Place

Ever since the explorations of Marco Polo and the travels of Montaigne, a lively dialogue has persisted about the pros and cons of travel. Lynne Sharon Schwartz joins this dialogue with a memoir that raises both serious and amusing questions about travel, using her own experiences as vivid illustrations. Not Now, Voyager takes us on a voyage of self-discovery as the author traces how travel has shaped her sensibilities from childhood through adulthood. She makes an adolescent visit to Miami Beach, where she confronts the powerful sensation of not belonging; she goes to Rome as a young woman and ponders the difference between ignorance and innocence; she ventures to Jamaica and witnesses political and social unrest; and she takes a family road trip to Montreal and watches her daughters come to startling realizations of their own. Schwartz’s personal history takes on new shapes, and her feelings about travel change as she shows us who she started out as and who she has become. Above all, this memoir exemplifies a mode of travel in and of itself: the mind on a journey or quest, pausing here and there, sometimes by design, sometimes by serendipity, lingering, occasionally backtracking, but always on the move.

From the author of the breathtaking bestsellers Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber, the extraordinary saga continues. Their passionate encounter happened long ago by whatever measurement Claire Randall took. Two decades before, she had traveled back in time and into the arms of a gallant eighteenth-century Scot named Jamie Fraser. Then she returned to her own century to bear his child, believing him dead in the tragic battle of Culloden. Yet his memory has never lessened its hold on her... and her body still cries out for him in her dreams. Then Claire discovers that Jamie survived. Torn between returning to him and staying with their daughter in her own era, Claire must choose her destiny. And as time and space come full circle, she must find the courage to face the passion and pain awaiting her...the deadly intrigues raging in a divided Scotland... and the daring voyage into the dark unknown that can reunite—or forever doom—her timeless love.

The bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land takes us along the Inside Passage, 1,000 miles of often treacherous water, which he navigates solo in a 35-foot sailboat, offering captivating discourses on art, philosophy, and navigation and an unsparing narrative of personal loss. "A work of great beauty and inexhaustible fervor." —The Washington Post Book World With the same rigorous observation (natural and social), invigorating stylishness, and encyclopedic learning that he brought to his National Book Award-winning Bad Land, Jonathan Raban conducts readers along the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau. But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and cultures: the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers—between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class.

Max Steiner's contribution to the formulation of early Hollywood scoring techniques is significant, particularly through his music for King Kong (1933) and The Informer (1935). The Academy Award winning score for Now, Voyager reflects the maturation of the composer's understanding of the dramatic function of music in film. The primary resources incorporated in the analysis include, from the Max Steiner collection at Brigham Young University, Steiner's letters and scrapbooks and his unpublished autobiography Notes to You. In addition to contributing to the composer's own perspective on the music for this film and on scoring practice in general, these papers contribute to a broader debate about how films are interpreted and the part music plays in these schemes of criticism. This study of the film score occurs within the broader theoretical and historical debates currently characterizing film musicology and explores, from varied perspectives, how the score is meaningful and important to the film. Devoted to a single score, this study brings together for analysis all the contingent factors in the score's creation, use, and reception and will appeal to film music scholars and to scholars of music and of film. The scope of the analysis will also interest scholars involved in music in multi-disciplinary art forms, feminist musicologists and film scholars, and students of musical theater. Separate chapters discuss Steiner's musical background, his technique of film scoring, historical and critical contexts of the film, the music and its context, and an analysis of the score. Musical examples illustrate the text and an appendix of selected film scores by Steiner is included along with a selected bibliography.

Lesbian characters, stories, and images were barred from onscreen depiction in Hollywood films from the 1930s to the 1960s together with all forms of "sex perversion." Through close readings of gothics, ghost films, and maternal melodramas addressed to female audiences, Uninvited argues that viewers are "invited" to make lesbian "inferences." Looking at the lure of some of the great female star personae (in films such as Rebecca, Pinky, The Old Maid, Queen Christina, and The Haunting) and at the visual coding of supporting actresses, it identifies lesbian spectatorial strategies. White's archival research, textual analyses, and novel theoretical insights make an important contribution to film, lesbian, and feminist studies. Book jacket.

A Note on the Captions Preface Introduction 1: Naughty Orators: Negation of Voices in Gaslight 2: Psychoanalysis and Cinema: Moments of Letter from an Unknown Woman3: Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly: Bette Davis and Now, Voyager 4: Postscript: To Whom It May Concern 5: Stella's Taste: Reading Stella Dallas Notes Bibliography Filmography Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.