Anxious Audrey

Florence Mabel Quiller-CouchProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

2.4

Word count: 335K words
Chapters: 34

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.Anxious Audrey by Mabel Quiller-CouchAuthor: Quiller-Couch, Mabel, 1866?-1924,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Feb 3, 2010

Editor's review

Anxious Audrey is a children's novel by the British author Mabel Quiller-Couch, a public-domain work made available by Project Gutenberg. Quiller-Couch was known for writing coming-of-age stories for young readers. This book centers on a girl named Audrey, and the title already suggests that her character is sensitive, tense, and prone to worry. Through everyday family and social situations, the story shows how a child deals with her fears and unease and how she gradually gains courage and the ability to adjust. For today's readers, the book's value is mainly literary and historical: it preserves the narrative tone and character-building methods of early twentieth-century English children's literature and can serve as a sample of the juvenile reading of that era. The electronic edition is free and suitable as light reading in the original English. Readers need not expect strong plot conflict; instead, they should note the author's delicate portrayal of a child's psychology and the period attitudes that surface between the lines.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Learners who enjoy English-language children's literature and want to build reading volume
Parents and teachers interested in children's emotional and character development
Literature enthusiasts studying early twentieth-century English juvenile fiction
Readers who want low-cost ebooks for extensive reading practice

Not a good fit for

Adult readers seeking strong plots and fast-paced stories
Beginners whose English is too weak to read an original novel independently
Readers looking for systematic psychological guidance methods

Reading tips

Read one chapter first to get a feel for the narrative pace, then decide whether to read closely or extensively.
Mark passages describing the protagonist's anxious psychology and revisit them afterward to trace the character's changes.
Read with an electronic dictionary; note period expressions as you go rather than stopping at every word.
If using the book for parent-child or classroom discussion, design topics around how Audrey faces her worries.

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.

FAQ

What English level is this book suitable for?

The original is in English, in the style of early twentieth-century children's fiction. The sentences are not very difficult, but some period expressions appear. It suits readers at an intermediate level who can understand general narrative texts with a dictionary; complete beginners should start with retellings or graded readers.

What is the core theme of the story?

Judging from the title and the book's positioning, it is a coming-of-age story about a girl prone to tension and worry, focusing on how a child faces her unease and gains adjustment and courage through family and everyday experience, rather than on adventure or suspense.

What should I note when reading the electronic edition?

The book is released by Project Gutenberg as a public-domain electronic text and is freely available. The layout is mainly plain text; reading software with dictionary lookup and annotation is recommended. As an early digitized version, some formatting may need adjusting, but this does not affect reading the main text.

Comments

Find this book

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

Florence Mabel Quiller-Couch Author · English

Mabel Quiller-Couch (Quiller-Couch, Mabel, 1866?–1924) was a British writer and editor of children's literature, born in Bodmin, Cornwall, and the sister of the literary critic Arthur Quiller-Couch. She co-wrote several works with her sister Lilian and was also a prolific independent author; nine of her works are held in this collection, mostly centring on children's growth and character formation and commonly classified as inspirational coming-of-age stories. Her representative titles include Paul the Courageous, Kitty Trenire, The Carroll Girls, Cornwall's Wonderland, Dick and Brownie, The Story of Jessie, Better than Play, and The Making of Mona, and she also compiled an anthology of children's poetry. Her writing is gentle and plain, using everyday stories to convey courage and kindness, and found a readership among children's books of her time. Public information on her education and detailed life is limited. She died in 1924.