The Absentee
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in nineteenth-century English and Irish literature who wish to broaden their reading horizons
- Literature students studying regional fiction, women writers, or land-system themes
- Readers who enjoy character groupings and gentle satire and do not seek strong plot
- English learners who wish to encounter classic works at low cost through public-domain eBooks
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer fast-paced plots, strong dramatic conflict, or suspenseful twists
- Beginners unfamiliar with nineteenth-century social background who are unwilling to consult notes
- Readers seeking a systematic understanding of Irish history and requiring scholarly introductions and detailed annotations
Reading tips
- Read the opening chapters first to clarify character relationships, then proceed chapter by chapter to avoid confusion from the large cast.
- Pay attention to dialogue between landlords, agents, and tenants to appreciate how class relations are presented.
- Pair the reading with concise background material on Irish history to help understand the land and absentee-landlord issues.
- If the English original proves difficult, read a Chinese translation or chapter summaries first, then return to key passages.
About the publisher
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
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
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FAQ
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About the author
Maria Edgeworth (Edgeworth, Maria, 1767-1849) was an English-language writer active from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Details of her life are limited in publicly available sources, but her works circulated widely. The collection here holds 20 of her works, including Castle Rackrent, The Absentee, The Parent's Assistant Or, Stories for Children, and the multi-volume Tales and Novels. She is known chiefly for novels and stories for children, often dealing with Irish gentry life, family relations, and the education of the young, combining realism with moral instruction and conveying lessons through everyday scenes and vivid characters. Castle Rackrent is regarded as an early family-history narrative of the Irish landlord class and has influenced later regional fiction, while her children's stories stress learning through reading. Overall, her writing bridges the novel and children's literature, with an influence that extended into the nineteenth century.
