Life and Gabriella: The Story of a Woman's Courage

Glasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson, 1873-1945Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.6
Word count
850K words
Chapters
85

Tags

English Originals Women's Fiction Life AdversityFate and FortuneFamily BondsInspirationCourageResiliencePsychological InsightSelf-GrowthComing-of-AgeFemale 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.Life and Gabriella: The Story of a Woman's Courage by GlasgowAuthor: Glasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson, 1873-1945,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Jan 3, 2005

Editor's review

This novel is one of Glasgow's early representative works, centered on a woman's resilient growth through adversity and showing the choices and responsibilities she faces when life takes an unexpected turn. The book continues the author's close observation of Southern social realities, with solid psychological characterization; the plot advances not through dramatic coincidence but through the accumulation and turning points of everyday life. For readers studying late nineteenth-century American women's writing and Southern literature, it offers a primary text for understanding the arc of Glasgow's development. As you read, note how the protagonist defines herself under the dual pressures of money and emotion, and how the author uses family relationships to reflect social change. Suitable as supplementary reading for American literature courses and for readers who enjoy slow-paced stories of personal growth.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read one chapter first to get a feel for the narrative pace before deciding whether to read it all, so a slow start doesn't make you give up.
  2. Annotate alongside Glasgow's biography and Southern literary context, noting each of the protagonist's key choices.
  3. If using it for a course, excerpt the family-conflict and career-decision passages for class discussion.
  4. Pair the English original with an audiobook to ease the burden of long sentences.

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
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
  74. 74
  75. 75
  76. 76
  77. 77
  78. 78
  79. 79
  80. 80
  81. 81
  82. 82
  83. 83
  84. 84
  85. 85

FAQ

Is this book suitable for non-native English readers? It is readable but requires some English proficiency. The language is late nineteenth-century realist in style, with long sentences and considerable description of social context. Try one or two chapters first, using notes or an introduction to understand the period; if it proves difficult, start with Glasgow's short stories or adapted materials.
How does this novel relate to Glasgow's other works? It is a mid-career work, continuing her focus on Southern society and women's circumstances. Compared with her later, more mature works, its structure is relatively plain, but it already shows her careful handling of psychology and social pressure, making it a good starting point for understanding her development.
What are the features of the Project Gutenberg edition? It is a public-domain e-book, free to access and easy to search and cite. The text is based on early digitization, laid out mainly as plain text, without the introductions and notes of a modern publisher's edition. For scholarly citation, check page numbers or consult another edition.

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

Glasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson, 1873-1945 Author

Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1873–1945) was an American novelist. Born in Virginia, she set much of her fiction against the background of Southern society, depicting characters struggling and maturing amid social change. The library holds thirteen of her works, including The Voice of the People, The Wheel of Life, The Deliverance: A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields, The Battle Ground, Virginia, Life and Gabriella: The Story of a Woman's Courage, and the story collection The Shadowy Third, and Other Stories. Her writing attends closely to psychology and real circumstance, often centering on women's lives and the transformation of Southern society, in a realistic and finely observed style that gives her a place in Southern American literature.