Hildebrand or, The Days of Queen Elizabeth, An Historic Romance, Vol. 3 of 3

AnonymousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.9
Word count
276K words
Chapters
28

Tags

English Originals Historical Fiction Historical ReappraisalSuspense ThrillerPortrait GalleryFate and FortunePalace IntrigueLove EntanglementsPower GamePopular NarrativeAncient StyleVictorian Era

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.Hildebrand; or, The Days of Queen Elizabeth, An Historic Romance, Vol. 3 of 3Author: Anonymous,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jan 18, 2015

Editor's review

This is the final volume of a trilogy: a historical romance set in the Elizabethan era. The author is anonymous, and the text comes from a Project Gutenberg public-domain ebook. As a specimen of Victorian popular historical romance, its value lies not in precise historical scholarship but in showing how readers of that era imagined the interplay of the Tudor court, political intrigue, and private emotion. The third volume typically serves to tie up threads and resolve suspense, making it suitable for genre reading by those interested in the lineage of the English historical novel. The prose carries the expansive description and moral judgment customary in nineteenth-century narrative, with a leisurely pace and clearly divided good and evil characters. If you are studying the narrative modes of historical romance, or want to experience reading a public-domain electronic text, this book can serve as light reference reading; if you seek modern pacing or rigorous historical detail, adjust your expectations.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read Volumes 1 and 2 first, or at least learn the prior story, before entering this volume's closing section.
  2. Prepare a simple character chart and note where court factions and private threads intersect.
  3. Treat the narrative conventions as an object of observation, noting how the author arranges coincidences and moral judgments.

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

FAQ

Can I read Volume 3 without having read the first two volumes? You can, but you will lose a great deal. Volume 3 serves to close threads from the first two volumes, and the character relationships and suspense have mostly been set up earlier. If you can read only this volume, first skim chapter summaries or a character list from the previous volumes; otherwise the factional relations and causes of events may feel abrupt.
How historically reliable is this book? It is a historical romance set in the Elizabethan era, focused on plot and emotion rather than historical reconstruction. The court atmosphere and political conflicts can serve as a specimen of period imagination, but specific events and characters' words and deeds should not be cited as historical fact. If you need historical information, consult scholarly works for comparison.
How difficult is the English? It is nineteenth-century English narrative: sentences tend to be long, description and commentary interweave, and while the vocabulary is not obscure, the word order and pacing feel distant to modern readers. Those with college-level English reading ability can work through it with notes; if you are reading mainly for story, start with the opening and closing paragraphs of chapters to grasp the main line, then decide whether to read closely.

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About the author

Anonymous Author

Anonymous is a collective designation used in English-language publishing for works whose authorship is unknown or unsigned, rather than the real name of a single author. The 716 titles attributed to this name include the Gospel of John, Psalms, Romans, Luke, Philippians, and 1 Corinthians from the World English Bible, as well as the Gospel of John and Psalms from the King James Version. Such texts are mainly religious classics and ancient folk traditions that were copied, translated, and compiled over long periods, making their original authors difficult to trace; they therefore circulated anonymously. Public information is limited, and neither nationality nor dates of birth and death can be confirmed. The significance of anonymity lies in focusing attention on the works themselves rather than on authorial identity, and in reminding readers of the collective and variable nature of texts in transmission.