Love and Life: An Old Story in Eighteenth Century Costume

Yonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary), 1823-1901Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.6
Word count
580K words
Chapters
58

Tags

English Originals Romance FictionHistorical Fiction Marriage EthicsSocial CustomsLove EntanglementsComplex HumanitySlow ReadingDaily ReflectionsSocial ObservationCross-Cultural ViewModern ChinaFemale 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.Love and Life: An Old Story in Eighteenth Century Costume by Charlotte M. YongeAuthor: Yonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary), 1823-1901,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: May 1, 2004

Editor's review

Charlotte M. Yonge was a major Victorian writer of domestic fiction and historical tales, and this work, subtitled after eighteenth-century costume, uses period manners to explore human feeling and fate. The author excels at building character and circumstance through everyday detail, examining love, kinship, and duty within concrete social decorum; the result has both the warmth of an older age and a probing of enduring questions of human nature. As a free Project Gutenberg ebook, it serves as an accessible sample of nineteenth-century British historical fiction—especially the "old story" mode of domestic narrative—and as material for studying the reception of eighteenth-century subjects in English literature. The language carries nineteenth-century English syntax and diction, and the pacing is slow, requiring some patience; precisely for that reason it offers a direct sense of old-fashioned domestic ethics and women's circumstances. Best read slowly in quiet sessions, in installments, as a period panorama to be taken up and set down rather than a plot-driven popular novel.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read one chapter first to get a feel for the rhythm, then decide on a fixed one or two chapters a day to avoid breaking off because of long sentences.
  2. Jot down details of eighteenth-century costume and etiquette as clues to the characters' circumstances.
  3. Read alongside background on Charlotte M. Yonge's life and Victorian domestic fiction.
  4. For English study, read through a paragraph before looking up words, prioritizing character relationships over word-for-word translation.

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

FAQ

Is this book a work of history or a novel? It is literary work, a historical novel-style narrative set in the eighteenth century; the subtitle's "costume" points to period manners rather than a history of dress. Read it as fiction about character and ethics, not as historical scholarship.
How difficult is the English? The original is nineteenth-century English with long sentences and older diction, harder than contemporary popular fiction. Readers with a college-level English reading base and some familiarity with long sentences will find it easier to enter; beginners may start with a Chinese translation or an annotated edition before returning to the original.
Why is the recommended edition listed as Project Gutenberg? Project Gutenberg provides free public-domain electronic texts, and this book is one of its English public-domain titles. It is easy to obtain and search in full text, but usually lacks modern editorial notes, so readers must supply background material themselves.

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

Yonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary), 1823-1901 Author

Charlotte M. Yonge (1823–1901) was a prolific nineteenth-century British novelist and writer of children's literature, with 65 works held in this collection. Public information is limited, but her representative works reveal the range of her writing: family novels such as The Heir of Redclyffe and The Daisy Chain centre on everyday life and moral growth; A Book of Golden Deeds and The Little Duke, aimed at young readers, recount historical stories and heroic character; she also wrote a life of John Coleridge Patteson, missionary bishop of the Melanesian Islands. Her works generally deal with family, faith, duty and history in a gentle, realistic style, and were influential among Victorian readers, with many long surviving as reading for young people.