Like the later and more famous novel Middlemarch, Deerbrook describes the life of country people in a fictional English town. The Grey family live in one of the loveliest houses in Deerbrook, but a change in their lives is going to take place... The Ibbotson sisters, Hester and Margaret, orphaned distant cousins of Mr. Grey. Like in Jane Austen's novels, we see how the sisters are trying to advance themselves. In Victorian England, the chief way for women to "advance themselves" is to marry well. But will they succeed? And if they succeed, will they be happy?

Thinking she would be ill for the rest of her life, Harriet Martineau wrote these partly autobiographical essays about life in the sickroom. Considered ground breaking, it asserted that the sickroom is the sick person's place and not the doctor's. Sick people were able and willing to decide what is best for them. In England and abroad, people declared that "a sick person cannot write a healthy book" and that Harriet Martineau was definitely out of her senses. It would be interesting to see how much has changed. - Summary by Stav Nisser and Wikipedia.

Hugely popular at their time of publication, Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy sought to turn the abstract principles of political economy into engaging, entertaining, and fundamentally humane works of social fiction. Through these dramatizations of dense economic theories, Martineau tried to educate and empower her readers, making even the most arcane concepts digestible and comprehendible to the widest possible audience . Each volume contains a different series of short, didactic novellas that "illustrate" a different set of economic principles, offering audiences tales that are equal parts riveting and edifying...