Maggie Miller: The Story of Old Hagar's Secret

Holmes, Mary Jane, 1825-1907Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.9
Word count
454K words
Chapters
46

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature InheritanceWomen's FateFamily BondsFamily SecretLove EntanglementsHidden LineageSuspenseful AtmosphereMoral DilemmaPopular Narrative19th Century America

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.Maggie Miller: The Story of Old Hagar's Secret by Mary Jane HolmesAuthor: Holmes, Mary Jane, 1825-1907,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Feb 1, 2004

Editor's review

This work is a novel by nineteenth-century American woman writer Mary Jane Holmes, built around the central mystery of "old Hagar's secret." Holmes excelled at domestic and emotional entanglements; within a popular-fiction framework, the book unfolds its characters' fates around secrets, origins, and moral choices, with the plot driven by information revealed layer by layer—a hallmark of the popular reading of its day. As a free Project Gutenberg ebook, its value lies more in literary-historical material: readers can observe the thematic orientation, narrative pacing, and moralizing manner of nineteenth-century American women's writing. It need not be judged by the tight standards of modern fiction; rather, it can be treated as a freely available English-language original text, suitable as supplementary material for a popular-fiction strand in English and American literature courses, or as a sample of the Project Gutenberg ebook format. The language is English, and length and vocabulary are moderately to fairly difficult; readers with some foundation in English reading are advised to try it.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the opening chapters first to sort out the character relationships, then take reading notes around the "secret" thread.
  2. When encountering unfamiliar words, read through the paragraph first to grasp the gist; there is no need to look up every word.
  3. Consult background material on nineteenth-century American women's fiction to understand its narrative conventions.
  4. After each chapter, retell the plot in two or three sentences to help maintain continuity in reading a long English work.

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

FAQ

What language is this book in, and how difficult is it to read? The original is in English and is a nineteenth-century American novel, with sentence patterns and diction bearing the marks of its era; vocabulary is moderately to fairly difficult. Readers with some experience of long-form English reading can try it; beginners are advised to use annotations or introductory materials.
Is this book suitable to read as a suspense novel? Not really. The "secret" in the title is a thread that drives the plot, but the book as a whole is domestic and emotional narrative; the suspense serves character fates and moral themes rather than modern detective-style suspense, so readers expecting strong twists may be disappointed.
What is special about this edition? This edition is released by Project Gutenberg as a free ebook containing the original English text. It is easy to obtain and search on electronic devices and is suitable as a base text for research or course reading, but it usually does not include the annotations and introductions of modern translations.

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

Holmes, Mary Jane, 1825-1907 Author

Mary Jane Holmes (1825–1907) was a popular nineteenth-century American novelist who found a wide readership in her day. Public information about her early life and education is limited, but her output was considerable: this site holds twenty-one of her works, which suggests how active she was in the book market and among readers of her time. Her representative novels include The English Orphans, ‘Lena Rivers, Bad Hugh, Family Pride, Cousin Maude, Maggie Miller, Gretchen, and Tempest and Sunshine. These stories are mostly drawn from domestic life and emotional entanglements, often turning on orphaned origins, family ties, pride and suffering, secrets and reconciliation. Their plots are eventful, their tone gentle, and their sensibility plainly sentimental and moralizing. Written for a broad popular audience and especially welcomed by women readers, her novels offer a useful window onto the character of nineteenth-century American popular fiction.