Elinor Wyllys Or, The Young Folk of Longbridge: A Tale. Volume 1

Susan Augusta Fenimore CooperProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.3
Word count
469K words
Chapters
47

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Social IntercourseFamily LifeSisterhoodOrdinary FateGrowing UpYouthful VibeLetter NarrativeDelicate DescriptionEarly AmericaSmall-Town Youth

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.Elinor Wyllys; Or, The Young Folk of Longbridge: A Tale. Volume 1 by CooperAuthor: Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 1813-1894,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Oct 1, 1999

Editor's review

This is the first volume of Susan Fenimore Cooper's novel, centered on the young people of the town of Longbridge and following the growth of the heroine Elinor Wyllys and the lives around her. The author was the daughter of the American writer James Fenimore Cooper; her portrait of small-town life is delicate and restrained, attentive to manners, character, and moral choice in everyday dealings, and carries the typical temper of nineteenth-century American regional narrative. This volume chiefly lays out relationships and the setting, moving slowly but distinguished by close observation and natural dialogue, and it restores a concrete, vivid old community for the reader. As the opening of a multi-volume work, it suits readers patient enough for slow social description, and also readers studying nineteenth-century American women's writing and local customs, who may use it as a textual sample. Reading this volume alone gives a first impression of the group portrait; the complete story requires the later volumes.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Begin by understanding that this is the first volume of a multi-volume work; set your goal as becoming familiar with the characters and the town rather than expecting a complete ending.
  2. Keep notes on the characters as you read; Cooper's network of family and neighbors is dense, and clarity makes the reading smoother.
  3. Read alongside background material on nineteenth-century American women's writing to understand the author's attention to family and morality.
  4. With the original English, slow down and focus on the tone and details of manners in the dialogue.

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
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47

FAQ

Can I understand the whole story by reading only the first volume? The first volume mainly establishes relationships and the setting; plot advances only so far, and the ending is not complete. To understand the whole story you need to continue with later volumes; reading this volume alone still works as an independent sample of the town portrait and narrative style.
What is the relationship between the author and Susan Cooper's father? Susan Fenimore Cooper was the daughter of the American writer James Fenimore Cooper. She was a writer herself, and her work often concerns rural and family life. This book is one of her novels, and its style is markedly different from her father's adventure fiction.
Does this edition include notes or an introduction? This edition comes from Project Gutenberg and is a public-domain electronic text, usually without a modern introduction or detailed notes. Readers who want background may consult separate materials on the author's life and nineteenth-century American literature.

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

Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper Author · American · 1813–1894

Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813–1894) was an American writer, nature writer, and philanthropist, and the daughter of novelist James Fenimore Cooper. In her diary-form work Rural Hours (1850), she depicts the seasonal nature and country life of Cooperstown, New York, and is regarded as a pioneer of American women's nature writing; she also founded charitable institutions such as an orphanage. The collection also includes her two-volume novel Elinor Wyllys, Female Suffrage: A Letter to the Christian Women of America, and The Lumley Autograph. Public information is limited; her writing centers on nature observation, rural life, and women's social issues, with a delicate style that is both literary and documentary.