A Bitter Heritage: A Modern Story of Love and Adventure

John Bloundelle-BurtonProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.4
Word count
415K words
Chapters
42

Tags

English Originals Romance Fiction Suspense ThrillerAdventure JourneyFate and FortuneFamily SecretLove EntanglementsRomantic AdventureHidden LineageInheritance QuarrelPopular NarrativeExotic Setting

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971, and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. A Bitter Heritage: A Modern Story of Love and Adventure by John Bloundelle-Burton. Author: Bloundelle-Burton, John, 1850-1917. Language: English. Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature. Release Date: Sep 2, 2016.

Editor's review

This novel comes from the hand of the late nineteenth-century English writer John Bloundelle-Burton; it is a plot-driven tale of love and adventure, combining the narrative appeal and period atmosphere of late Victorian popular fiction. Under the title A Bitter Heritage, the work unfolds around emotional entanglements and adventurous episodes, and is suited to readers who wish to understand the tradition of English popular literature or who enjoy classical adventure narratives. As a free electronic text from Project Gutenberg, it is easy to search, quote, and read in parallel, making it especially suitable as supplementary material in English literature courses for comparing popular fiction with the classical canon. Readers may wish to place it back in the publishing context of the late nineteenth century, noting how the author handles love, family, and adventure, as well as the popular-fiction features of narrative pace and characterization. For research, it can be paired with extended reading in the English literature background of the PR class; for leisure, it can be treated as light reading with an old-fashioned flavor.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the opening chapters first to judge the narrative pace and character relationships before deciding whether to read through or select portions.
  2. Keep pen and paper to record character relationships and key events, so as to clarify how the adventure line and the emotional line intertwine.
  3. If used for a course, compare it with English popular fiction of the same period to observe similarities and differences in subject matter and technique.
  4. Use the search function of the electronic text to locate recurring images and thematic terms as an aid to analysis.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42

FAQ

Is this book suitable for non-native English readers? The work is in late nineteenth-century English, with sentence patterns and vocabulary characteristic of the period, so non-native readers will need a certain vocabulary and patience. It is advisable to sample the first few chapters; if the reading resistance is high, use a dictionary or a bilingual edition and treat it as intensive long-form reading rather than an introductory text.
What is the genre of this novel, and what should readers focus on? Judging from the title and the author's period, it is popular fiction combining love and adventure. Readers may focus on how character relationships drive the plot, how adventure passages are organized, and how the author handles themes such as family, heritage, and emotional conflict, rather than expecting the tight structure of modern genre fiction.
Is the public-domain electronic edition suitable for academic citation? Project Gutenberg provides a free electronic text that is convenient for reading and searching, but it is usually not an authoritative scholarly edition and lacks textual notes and detailed annotations. For formal academic writing, an authoritative print edition should be used; the electronic text can serve for preliminary reading, locating passages, and auxiliary searching.

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About the author

John Bloundelle-Burton Author · British · 1850–1917

John Bloundelle-Burton (1850–1917) was a British novelist, born John Edward Bloundelle-Burton around 1850. He began his career as a journalist for the London Standard and turned to full-time fiction writing in 1885, publishing some sixty works. He wrote mainly historical and adventure novels, often set against European dynastic wars, religious conflict, and sea voyages, with plots centering on reversals of fortune, unjust accusation, and loyalty, in a popular and dramatically vivid style. Fourteen of his works are held in the collection, including Fortune's My Foe: A Romance, Across the Salt Seas: A Romance of the War of Succession, In the Day of Adversity, Clash of Arms: A Romance, Denounced: A Romance, The Scourge of God: A Romance of Religious Persecution, The Hispaniola Plate, and The Seafarers, along with such representative titles as The Silent Shore, The Denounced, and Bitter Heritage. Public information is limited, and details of his life remain largely uncertain; later readers chiefly regard him as a prolific author of late Victorian popular historical adventure fiction.