Cora and The Doctor or, Revelations of A Physician's Wife

Leslie, Madeline, 1815-1893Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.7

Word count: 706K words
Chapters: 71

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.Cora and The Doctor; or, Revelations of A Physician's Wife by Madeline LeslieAuthor: Leslie, Madeline, 1815-1893,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Mar 8, 2011

Editor's review

This novel unfolds from the perspective of Cora, a doctor's wife, using domestic life and observations from the consulting room to examine nineteenth-century American attitudes toward illness, marriage, and the position of women. Madeleine Leslie, who wrote for many years for family readers, tells the story plainly and with evident moral concern; the plot advances through everyday conversation and characters' self-reflection rather than strong dramatic conflict. Its value lies not in thrilling incident but in showing how middle-class families of the time understood health, duty, and faith, making it useful to readers studying nineteenth-century American women's writing and the domestic novel tradition. It is best read as a text of social manners, with attention to the narrator's attitudes toward patients, the role of the wife, and family order. It suits slow, sectional reading in a quiet setting, and a little background in nineteenth-century American social history will bring out its period character.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Researchers interested in nineteenth-century American fiction and the tradition of women's writing
General readers who enjoy domestic and moral fiction with a gentle pace
Readers studying the history of medicine and social manners who want literary supporting evidence
Intermediate and advanced English learners who need public-domain English texts for reading practice

Not a good fit for

Readers who prefer strong plots, fast pacing, or suspenseful twists
Readers seeking modern medical knowledge or clinical guidance
Readers impatient with religious preaching and moral exhortation in narrative

Reading tips

Read the opening chapters first to get a sense of the narrative voice and relationships before deciding to read straight through or selectively.
Keep a brief reference sheet on nineteenth-century American society and mark passages dealing with illness and family as you read.
Collect the passages describing female characters in one place and do a thematic review after finishing.
Read the English original in installments, summarizing the main points in two or three sentences after each chapter.

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

Is this book medical reportage or fiction?

It is fiction, telling its story from the perspective of a doctor's wife and using scenes of home and consulting room to reflect the social attitudes and everyday ethics of the time; it is not a clinical record or a medical guide. Readers should not use it as medical material.

Can readers with only a fair command of English read this book?

The book is a public-domain English text, and the language is generally plain, though it carries nineteenth-century expressions and religious vocabulary. Readers with intermediate English can work through it chapter by chapter with a dictionary; those mainly seeking the content in Chinese should build up period background first.

Why is it worth paying attention to the female characters?

The novel observes home and patients through the eyes of a doctor's wife, and how women situate themselves between marriage, faith, and the duty of care is an important thread. Following this thread lets the family story be read as a sample of nineteenth-century women's circumstances rather than mere plot entertainment.

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About the author

Leslie, Madeline, 1815-1893 Author

Madeline Leslie (Leslie, Madeline, 1815–1893) was a nineteenth-century author known for writing for children and families; details of her life are limited in publicly available sources, and she is known today mainly through the many works she left behind. Twenty of her works are held in this collection, most of them in the inspirational and coming-of-age category, including Minnie's Pet Cat, Little Frankie and his Mother, Bertie's Home or, the Way to be Happy, The Pearl of Peace or, The Little Peacemaker, The Lost Kitty, and Little Robins' Love One to Another. Judging from these titles and themes, her writing often centres on childhood life, family relationships, pets and nature, harmony and good deeds, gently conveying to young readers lessons of honesty, kindness, and happiness in simple language suited to reading together with parents, and is fairly representative of children's literature of her time.