The Border Spy or, The Beautiful Captive of the Rebel Camp

Hazelton, HarryProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.1
Word count
214K words
Chapters
22

Tags

English Originals War and Military Fiction Suspense ThrillerMilitary StrategyAdventure JourneyHeroismRival CampsPopular Narrative

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.The Border Spy; or, The Beautiful Captive of the Rebel Camp by Harry HazeltonAuthor: Hazelton, Harry,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Aug 29, 2014

Editor's review

This is an old-style English adventure novel from the Project Gutenberg public-domain library. The title already names its two core elements—a border spy and a beautiful captive in a rebel camp—placing it squarely in the typical vein of nineteenth-century American popular romance. Its value lies not in literary refinement but in preserving the tastes of that era's mass readership: the plot moves through disguise, opposing camps, rescue, and romantic suspense, with a direct pace and strong sense of scene. For readers studying the history of American popular fiction, frontier narrative, or old-style serialized fiction, it is a usable primary text. It suits fragmented reading on electronic devices, and also works as English extensive-reading material for observing how nineteenth-century English narrative syntax differs from today's fiction. A caveat: the characterization and the treatment of gender and ethnicity carry clear period limitations; today's reader should keep a critical distance and treat it as a historical text rather than a model of values.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the opening chapters first to grasp the camp relationships and character identities, then decide whether to read through
  2. Keep pen and paper to record aliases and camp affiliations and avoid confusion
  3. Guess unfamiliar archaic words from context first, then look them up together after each chapter
  4. Read it as a historical text and mark passages that reflect period attitudes

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

FAQ

Is this book in Chinese or English? The original is in English, from the Project Gutenberg public-domain ebook library, with English listed as the language. If reading English is difficult, use a dictionary or a bilingual reading tool alongside it.
What genre does the story roughly belong to? Judging by the title and classification, it is a nineteenth-century American popular adventure romance, centered on border espionage, a rebel camp, and the rescue of a captive, with elements of factional confrontation and romantic suspense.
Do the era's attitudes in the book affect reading? Yes. Old popular fiction often carries the limitations of its time in its treatment of gender, ethnicity, and violence. Read it as a historical text, distinguishing its value as literary-historical material from contemporary value judgments.

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

Hazelton, Harry Author

Harry Hazelton is an author about whom very little biographical information is available. His nationality, dates of birth and death, and full English name are not clearly documented, and the limited public records make it difficult to trace the outline of his life. Two of his works are currently held in the collection: The Prisoner of the Mill or, Captain Hayward's Body Guard and The Border Spy or, The Beautiful Captive of the Rebel Camp. Judging from the titles and subtitles, both works show clear features of popular adventure and historical romance, involving imprisonment, escort missions, espionage, and prisoners of war. Their narratives tend to focus on tense plot development and shifting circumstances of the characters, in a style reminiscent of nineteenth-century popular fiction or sensation stories. Owing to the scarcity of materials, his usual genre classification and the full scope of his writing cannot yet be confirmed, and the later influence of his works remains to be further examined.