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The Ex-Classics Web Site About Us The Ex-Classics project was founded in 2000 to fill an unmet need.  When reading the blurb etc. to a book by Charles Dickens or Charlotte Bronte, say, we would often come across sentences like "Favourite reading included . . ."  If  it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us. So off we go to the library or bookshop, to be met first with blank stares and then with the information that the book has been out of print for decades. Our first two books were Gil Blas and Hudibras, which are prime examples of this.  This web site is dedicated to rescuing these works from obscurity and making them available online, both for reading directly, and for downloading. Book of the Month -- April 2021 The Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington The Memoirs of Lætitia Pilkington give a wonderful glimpse into several worlds of the 18^th Century – respectable Dublin, into which she was born the daughter of an eminent doctor; Dr. Swift and his circle, in which she moved until the failure of her marriage; Grub Street and the demimonde of London where she was afterwards forced to scrape a living. She was friend and confidante of Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, and Colley Cibber. Sometime she hob-nobbed with Dukes, sometimes she was in a debtor's prison. Throughout it all she kept her courage, her wit, and her remarkable memory for the telling anecdote, which she drew on for her memoirs. Though they were written principally to make money, both through sales and through blackmail, she hoped That I, like the classics, shall be read When time, and all the world are dead. They have long been drawn on by biographers of Dr. Swift, but fell into neglect during the Victorian era, which no doubt found her altogether unsuitable for respectable readers. There have been a few to admire her, though: Virginia Woolf began her appreciation Can you imagine a very extraordinary cross between Moll Flanders and Lady Ritchie, between a rolling and rollicking woman of the town and a lady of breeding and refinement? Lætitia Pilkington (1712-1759) was something of the sort, shady, shifty, adventurous, and yet, like Thackeray's daughter, like Miss Mitford, like Madame de Sévigné and Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, so imbued with the old traditions of her sex that she wrote, as ladies talk, to give pleasure. Throughout her Memoirs, we can never forget that it is her wish to entertain, her unhappy fate to sob More recently, interest has been re-awakened by a (very expensive, and now out of print) edition in 1997, and Norma Clarke's recent biography Queen of the Wits. Here she is in her own words; and if it is not all literally true, then it certainly should be. What do you think? Any comments about this site or its contents? E-mail me (Click here) We have an occasional newsletter - please say if you want to be added to the mailing list. We never give out your details to spammers, or anyone else, for that matter. No-Copyright notice This site and its contents are public domain and free to the world. Anything in it may be copied and distributed free of charge or obligation. [There are one or two exceptions to this, which are clearly marked where they occur.] We expect this policy to be passed on - anyone who copies our texts or web pages and tries to claim copyright for themselves is stealing - not from us, but from you, and from everyone. An example of what we mean.

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