Louisa of Prussia and Her Times: A Historical Novel

Luise MühlbachProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.9
Word count
1.3M words
Chapters
133

Tags

English Originals Historical Fiction Historical ReappraisalPortrait GalleryPatriotismTurbulent EraSocial 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.Louisa of Prussia and Her Times: A Historical Novel by L. MühlbachAuthor: Mühlbach, L. (Luise), 1814-1873,Language: English, Class: PT: Language and Literatures: Germanic, Scandinavian, and Icelandic literatures, Release Date: Jan 1, 2003

Editor's review

Set against the backdrop of Queen Louisa of Prussia and the Napoleonic Wars, this historical novel is a fairly typical work in the nineteenth-century German-language historical fiction tradition. Mühlbach excelled at interweaving court politics, the turbulence of war, and individual fates, and readers can enter a historical scene shaped by royal marriage, diplomatic maneuvering, and national crisis. As a public-domain ebook from Project Gutenberg, its value lies first in accessibility: readers need not hunt down a rare print copy to read an English translation that reflects nineteenth-century popular historical narrative taste. It is worth reading both as a novel and as a sample of the reception history of historical sources, noting how the author shapes Louisa's image, arranges the sequence of Napoleonic-era events, and embeds Prussian national sentiment in the narrative. It suits readers interested in early modern European history, the Napoleonic Wars, or the historical novel as a genre, and works well read in segments on a commute or before bed.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Look up a basic timeline of the Napoleonic Wars and the Prussian royal family before entering the plot.
  2. Divide your reading into three threads—court, war, and characters—and take simple notes.
  3. Slow down during long dialogues and note how the author shapes Louisa's image.
  4. After finishing, compare with relevant historical entries to distinguish fictional invention from historical fact.

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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FAQ

Is this book the English original or a translation? According to the source information, this is an English ebook released by Project Gutenberg, in English, with the original work by the German writer Mühlbach. Readers read an English text, not a modern Chinese translation.
Can I read it without a foundation in early modern European history? Yes, but it is advisable to learn some basic background on the Napoleonic Wars and Prussia first. The novel has a high density of characters and events, and a basic timeline clearly lowers the threshold for understanding.
Is this book suitable as historical research material? It is better suited as a sample of nineteenth-century historical fiction and popular historical narrative than as a modern academic history work. If used for research, it should be placed in the context of reception history or literary history and compared with professional historical scholarship.

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

Luise Mühlbach Author · German · 1814–1873

Luise Mühlbach (1814–1873), born Klara Müller Mundt, was a German writer of historical fiction who published under the pen name Luise Mühlbach. Over her lifetime she wrote more than fifty historical novels, most of them drawing on court life and anecdotes about famous figures, such as Frederick the Great and His Court and Marie Antoinette and Her Son. Her works are notable for their evocation of historical atmosphere and their interweaving of personal anecdotes, combining readability with popular storytelling; they were widely translated into English and found a readership in the English-speaking world. This collection holds twenty-two of her works, including long historical novels about European figures such as Frederick the Great, Joseph II and Napoleon. Public information on her early life and education is limited, so no speculation is offered here.