Courtship and Marriage, and the Gentle Art of Home-Making

Annie Shepherd SwanProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.5
Word count
124K words
Chapters
13

Tags

English Originals Home and LivingRelationships Family BondsLife PhilosophyDaily ReflectionsLife WisdomHeartwarming NarrativeFemale Perspective

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.Courtship and Marriage, and the Gentle Art of Home-Making by Annie S. SwanAuthor: Swan, Annie S., 1859-1943,Language: English, Class: TX: Technology: Home economics, Release Date: Apr 25, 2011

Editor's review

Annie S. Swan's Courtship and Marriage, and the Gentle Art of Home-Making is a life-guidance work on courtship, marriage, and household management, classified under domestic economy. In a gentle and practical tone, the author discusses courtship, choice of marriage partner, and home-making, covering topics such as relations between the sexes, family responsibilities, and the management of daily life. The views in the book bear clear marks of their time, reflecting mainstream expectations in British society from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century regarding courtship, marriage, and family roles. As a public-domain text, its value lies more in social and intellectual history: readers can observe the public discourse of that era on marriage, gender division of labor, and family happiness. The style is friendly and the reasoning plain, making it suitable as historical material for readers interested in social customs and family attitudes from the late Victorian to the Edwardian era, rather than as a contemporary life guide to be followed literally.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read it as a period document and note its assumptions about marriage and family roles rather than accepting its advice wholesale.
  2. Record points that differ markedly from contemporary views as you read, forming your own notes on intellectual history.
  3. Read selectively by theme; the sections on courtship, marriage, and home management can be read separately according to interest.
  4. For research, compare it with other domestic works of the same period to observe common features of public discourse.

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

FAQ

Is this book suitable as a modern dating guide? Not really. The views in the book took shape in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, and its expectations regarding marriage, gender division of labor, and family roles differ considerably from contemporary society. Its value lies in helping readers understand the public attitudes of that era, not in offering modern life advice that can be directly applied.
What does the book mainly discuss? Judging from the title and classification, the content centers on courtship, choice of marriage partner, and home-making and daily management, covering topics such as relations between the sexes, family responsibilities, and life arrangements. It is presented in a gentle, reasoned manner and reflects the mainstream views of the author's time on courtship and marriage.
Is the original English difficult to read? The author's style is plain and friendly, mainly reasoning and discussion, with sentence structures that are not overly complex; readers with intermediate English reading ability can attempt it. However, the book involves old-fashioned details of daily life and period expressions; when encountering unfamiliar passages, use the context to understand them rather than looking up every word.

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

Annie Shepherd Swan Author · Scottish · 1859–1943

Annie Shepherd Swan (1859–1943) was a Scottish journalist and novelist who also wrote under pen names such as David Lyall and Mrs Burnett Smith. She was known for her romantic novels for women, often exploring love, family and everyday moral questions and drawing on Scottish town life; The Guinea Stamp: A Tale of Modern Glasgow centres on the urban experience of modern Glasgow, while Thankful Rest and Courtship and Marriage, and the Gentle Art of Home-Making deal with family life and with the conduct of courtship and homemaking. She published more than two hundred novels, serials and stories in her lifetime and is regarded as one of the most successful popular novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She edited the magazine Women at Home, took an active part in the women's suffrage movement, and was awarded the CBE in 1930.