Keeping Up Appearances
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Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- General readers who enjoy British humorous short stories and want light reading
- English learners who want to improve their sense of the language through short extensive reading
- Readers interested in late 19th- and early 20th-century British literature
- Teachers who need short texts for classroom or book club discussion
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer long, complex plots and deep character development
- Researchers seeking systematic literary history or in-depth analysis of the work
- Readers impatient with old-fashioned English and needing a modern translation
Reading tips
- Read through once to grasp the plot and the jokes, then revisit key dialogue to appreciate the satire's measure.
- Mark unfamiliar old-fashioned expressions while reading, look them up together afterward, and build language intuition.
- Read alongside other Jacobs short stories to observe the repetition and variation in his narrative patterns.
- If used for a book club, discuss the characters' motives and endings around the theme of "respectability."
About the publisher
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
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About the author
William Wymark Jacobs (1863–1943) was a British short-story writer, born in London in 1863 and died there in 1943. In his early years he lived around the Thames docks and was familiar with the lives of sailors and dockworkers, which led him to write a great many humorous sea stories, often in a light and witty tone. His best-known work, The Monkey's Paw, is a classic horror short story included in The Lady of the Barge (1902); noted for its tight suspense and sudden twists, it is still widely anthologized in horror collections. The library holds 109 of his works, including The Lady of the Barge and Others, Ship's Company, A Tiger's Skin, Captains All, and Night Watches; his common category is inspirational growth. Public information is limited and details of his life are largely unavailable, yet his fiction is distinctive in subject, blending humor with horror, and has had a lasting influence on later short-story writing.
