My Brave and Gallant Gentleman: A Romance of British Columbia

Watson, Robert, 1882-1948Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
414K words
Chapters
42

Tags

English Originals Romance Fiction Portrait GalleryAdventure JourneyHeroismAngst RomanceExotic Culture

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.My Brave and Gallant Gentleman: A Romance of British Columbia by Robert WatsonAuthor: Watson, Robert, 1882-1948,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Mar 21, 2010

Editor's review

Set in British Columbia, Canada, this novel belongs to the romance-adventure strand of early Canadian English literature. The author, Robert Watson, lived from the late nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century, and the narrative bears the typical features of popular romance fiction of its time: the plot advances through characters' fortunes and emotional conflicts, while regional scenery forms an important backdrop. For readers curious about how western Canada was imagined in English literature, the book offers an early reference sample. As a public-domain e-book from Project Gutenberg, its value is closer to that of a documentary and literary-historical source than a contemporary bestseller. Readers might treat it as a window onto popular narrative tastes a century ago, noting how frontier, courage, and gentlemanly ideals are shaped—and where these notions may now seem dated or open to discussion. Suitable for selective reading within comparative literature, Canadian studies, or the history of popular English fiction.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the opening and ending first to grasp the main thread, then fill in the middle to reduce resistance from the old-fashioned pacing.
  2. Jot down descriptions of British Columbia's nature and towns as material for regional literary study.
  3. For coursework or research, read alongside other Canadian English novels of the same period to observe shared themes.

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

FAQ

Is this a contemporary new release? No. The author Robert Watson lived from 1882 to 1948, and this is an early English novel. The version you see is a public-domain electronic text produced by Project Gutenberg and released around 2010; it is not a newly written contemporary novel.
What English level is needed to read it? The text is a public-domain English book with period syntax and vocabulary; intermediate or higher English reading ability is recommended. For research purposes, read slowly with a dictionary and background materials; to grasp the story only, read chapter summaries first and then selected passages.
Is it suitable for learning about Canadian history? It is first and foremost a literary work, not a history book. Its depictions of British Columbia reflect the imagination and popular tastes of the author's era and can serve as literary and cultural-historical corroboration, but should not be treated as reliable historical fact.

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

Watson, Robert, 1882-1948 Author · 1882–1948

Robert Watson (1882–1948) was an English-language author about whose life little is publicly documented; his nationality, education, and writing career cannot be reliably established. Judging from his surviving works, he was skilled at building romantic narratives around regional settings. My Brave and Gallant Gentleman: A Romance of British Columbia is set in British Columbia, Canada, weaving emotional entanglements into frontier life, while The Spoilers of the Valley likewise develops its plot against a specific local environment, colored by adventure and emotional conflict. His writing emphasizes atmosphere and the unfolding of character relationships, making for readable stories in the popular romantic mode. Two of his works are held in this collection, offering readers a glimpse of how regional romance was commonly written in early twentieth-century popular English-language fiction.