Death to the Inquisitive! A Story of Sinful Love

Sheldon, Lurana, 1862-1945Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.0
Word count
221K words
Chapters
23

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Crime and PunishmentFate and FortuneLove EntanglementsForbidden LovePsychological InsightDark AtmosphereCriminal PsychologySocial CritiqueMoral DilemmaFemale 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.Death to the Inquisitive! A story of sinful love by Lurana SheldonAuthor: Sheldon, Lurana, 1862-1945,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Dec 1, 2018

Editor's review

The title alone—Death to the Inquisitive! A story of sinful love—signals a heavy dose of melodrama, and its author, Lurana Sheldon, was active in the American popular-fiction scene from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, often trading on emotional entanglement and moral transgression. For today's reader its value lies mainly in the documentary and genre-reading dimension: it preserves a narrative sample of how popular fiction of the era handled desire, guilt, and social discipline, and offers a glimpse into the writing paths available to women authors in the popular periodicals and publishing market of the time. The prose presumably features strong dramatic scenes and inner conflict, making it suitable for close reading in the contexts of literary history, popular culture, or gender studies. As a public-domain ebook from Project Gutenberg, it is easily accessible and is best approached out of research or genre interest rather than in expectation of modern psychological depth or intricate structure.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the first two chapters to gauge the narrative pace before committing to the whole book.
  2. Note the tension between the depiction of desire and the moral judgment passed on it.
  3. Read alongside materials on late-nineteenth-century American popular publishing history.
  4. In the English original, skim chapter titles first to catch the plot turning points.

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

FAQ

Is this book suitable as material for studying late-nineteenth-century American popular fiction? It works as a genre sample but should not on its own carry a literary-historical argument. It shows the period's common treatment of desire, guilt, and women's circumstances and can be set beside contemporary serialized fiction, bestseller lists, and other women writers' works to observe how market taste and moral discourse interacted.
Can readers with average English read this book? The book is a public-domain English original written in the popular narrative style of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century; sentences may run long and mix colloquial and formal registers. Try the first chapter with a dictionary and proceed section by section; if it proves difficult, read a Chinese summary of the plot first, then return to the original.
What does 'the Inquisitive' in the title refer to? The available materials give only the title and a brief description without detailing the characters' relationships. From the title, 'the Inquisitive' more likely stands for some force of moral scrutiny or social discipline rather than a literal religious inquisitor; the specific referent needs to be confirmed in the text and should not be asserted without reading it.

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

Sheldon, Lurana, 1862-1945 Author

Lurana Sheldon (1862–1945) was an American author of popular fiction and periodicals for young readers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because public information is limited, little is known about the details of her life, and seven of her works can currently be confirmed. Her best-known work is For Gold or Soul? The Story of a Great Department Store, set against the backdrop of a large department store and reflecting the ethical and human conflicts of urban commercial society at the time. Another group consists of issues 1 through 5 of My Queen: A Weekly Journal for Young Women, published in succession between late September and late October 1900; aimed at young women, it combines storytelling with the serial features of a periodical. She also wrote popular fiction with dramatic tension, such as Death to the Inquisitive! A story of sinful love. Her writing appealed to popular reading tastes, centering on romance, moral choices, and city life, and reflecting the character of American popular publishing at the turn of the century.