Guy Kenmore's Wife, and The Rose and the Lily

Miller, Alex. McVeigh, Mrs., 1850-1937Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.2
Word count
594K words
Chapters
60

Tags

English Originals Married LifePortrait GalleryFate and FortuneFamily BondsLove EntanglementsTender SentimentMoral DilemmaPopular NarrativeSocial ObservationFemale 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.Guy Kenmore's Wife, and The Rose and the Lily by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh MillerAuthor: Miller, Alex. McVeigh, Mrs., 1850-1937,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Jun 26, 2013

Editor's review

This volume collects two works by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller, a late-nineteenth-century American writer of popular fiction, and belongs squarely to the tradition of sentimental domestic melodrama. With delicate strokes the author depicts misunderstanding, fidelity, and emotional trial in marriage; plot twists come thick and fast and the characters' fortunes rise and fall sharply, carrying the dramatic tension typical of the era's popular novels. For today's readers its value lies half in the story itself and half in its documentary significance: it offers a direct view of the narrative patterns, moral assumptions, and modes of emotional expression favored by nineteenth-century American women readers. The language is the written English of the period, with long sentences and elaborate rhetoric, so the reading rhythm differs from that of modern fiction. It suits as supplementary material for the history of Anglo-American popular literature and for studies of gender and domestic narrative, and also as leisure reading for lovers of classic melodrama—one story at a time, with no need to rush.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Start with the shorter of the two works, get a feel for the language, then move on to the other, so you don't tire yourself out at the outset.
  2. Keep pen and paper handy to record characters and plot twists; novels of this kind have many characters and dense misunderstandings, and it reads better once sorted out.
  3. Don't parse long sentences word by word; follow the dialogue and key events to grasp the main thread.
  4. Read it alongside other popular novels of the same period and note similarities and differences in images of women and views of marriage.

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
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  40. 40
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  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
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FAQ

How many stories does this book contain, and are they related? The book contains two works, Guy Kenmore's Wife and The Rose and the Lily. Each stands alone, with no direct connection in characters or plot, so they can be read separately according to interest.
How difficult is the English, and is it suitable for non-native readers? The text is late-nineteenth-century written English, with rather long sentences and considerable rhetoric; the vocabulary feels dated but is on the whole not obscure. Readers with some foundation in English can finish it with a dictionary; beginners may find the pace slow.
Why was this book released by Project Gutenberg? Project Gutenberg is an early nonprofit project providing free ebooks, devoted to preparing works that have entered the public domain. This book is one of its digitization outputs, which is why it is freely available, in an electronically prepared edition of the original text.

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About the author

Miller, Alex. McVeigh, Mrs., 1850-1937 Author

Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller (1850–1937) was an author of popular English-language fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, known by her married name and leaving behind a body of plot-driven novels. Because public information is limited, details of her life, nationality, and education remain difficult to establish with certainty; the library holds sixteen of her works. Titles such as The Senator's Bride and The Bride of the Tomb suggest that she specialized in suspenseful, emotionally charged popular narratives built around marriage, hidden identity, and revenge. Her heroines are often poor or otherwise disadvantaged, as in Little Nobody and Pretty Geraldine, the New York Salesgirl. Such fiction catered to a broad readership and bears the clear marks of the serial and inexpensive popular literature of its day; though not part of the classic canon, it offers a useful sample for studying women's writing in popular fiction.