A Little Queen of Hearts: An International Story

Ogden, Ruth, 1853-1927Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
405K words
Chapters
41

Tags

English Originals Children's Literature Family BondsTruth Goodness BeautyHeartwarming NarrativePopular NarrativeExotic CultureCross-Cultural ViewYouth Reading

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 Little Queen of Hearts: An International Story by Ruth OgdenAuthor: Ogden, Ruth, 1853-1927,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Feb 26, 2017

Editor's review

Subtitled "An International Story," this book follows a young protagonist through cross-regional experiences, centered on a "little queen" figure. Its strength lies in placing childhood growth amid contact between different cultural backgrounds, letting readers see how early children's literature handled the relationship between "elsewhere" and "home." The narrative is gentle and the character relationships clear, making it a good entry point into Ruth Ogden's style of children's fiction. For today's readers its value is more in literary history and cultural observation: it shows how the era wrote about childhood, manners, and exotic imaginings, and the story can also prompt reflection on one's own understanding of "international." As a public-domain ebook, its length and difficulty are moderate, suited to slow reading and note-taking.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. First sort out the relationships between the protagonist and those around her, then follow the changes of place so as not to get lost.
  2. Pay attention to descriptions of foreign scenery; after finishing, compare them with real geography and history.
  3. Read it alongside her New York works to compare how the author handles local and international subjects.
  4. For English practice, write two or three summary sentences per chapter to train both summarizing and retaining plot threads.

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

FAQ

What exactly does "international story" mean? The "international" in the subtitle mainly means the story involves characters from different regions and cultural backgrounds, not modern transnational issues. Readers can understand it as the author opening up a coming-of-age story to a broader geography and set of relationships.
Can I read this directly without having read the author's other works? Yes. The book stands alone and does not depend on earlier works. To better understand the author's style, you might look at her New York stories afterward; the two share similarities in characterization and narrative tone.
Is this book suitable for children? The original was aimed at young readers, but the language bears the marks of its time, so today's children may find the original difficult to read directly. An adult can read along or select passages, focusing discussion on the characters' choices and cultural differences rather than explaining every word.
What if the public-domain edition has no introduction? You can fill in the background yourself: first learn about the author's life and when she wrote, then look up basic information about the places in the story. Making simple character and place lists as you read can effectively make up for the lack of an introduction.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Ogden, Ruth, 1853-1927 Author

Ruth Ogden (1853–1927) was an English-language children's author active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Public information about her life is limited, and basic details such as her nationality are not clearly recorded in the available sources. Seven of her works are held in the collection, including His Little Royal Highness, A Little Queen of Hearts: An International Story, A Loyal Little Red-Coat: A Story of Child-life in New York a Hundred Years Ago, Tattine, Courage, Little Homespun, and an index to her works. These titles suggest that she wrote chiefly for young readers, with stories centered on children and featuring royal and courtly imagination, historical childhood settings, and themes of character and courage. Her warm, instructive tales circulated among English-language children's books of her time and remain of interest for the study of early children's literature.