The Bow of Orange Ribbon: A Romance of New York

Barr, Amelia E., 1831-1919Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.2
Word count
477K words
Chapters
48

Tags

English Originals Romance Fiction Family FeudLove EntanglementsInterethnic RomanceUrban RomanceTender SentimentWestern ThoughtIdentity ConstructionNew York ChroniclesModern 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.The Bow of Orange Ribbon: A Romance of New York by Amelia E. BarrAuthor: Barr, Amelia E., 1831-1919,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Nov 28, 2005

Editor's review

This novel comes from Amelia E. Barr, a late nineteenth-century American popular novelist, and unfolds a love story set against the early history of New York. Barr's work is known for its attention to regional manners and family ethics; here she places romantic narrative within the social fabric of colonial New York, where the orange ribbon serves both as a token of affection and as a hint of the tangled claims of identity and belonging. For readers interested in the tradition of American historical romance, it offers a window onto nineteenth-century popular reading tastes: the plot advances through misunderstanding and reunion, characters are clearly divided between good and bad, and feeling is expressed openly and ardently. As a public-domain ebook, it is better treated as a specimen within literary history than as an isolated diversion. While reading, note how the author balances historical setting against private emotion, and how her female characters exercise agency in matters of marriage. Read alongside sources on colonial New York, it reveals more clearly how popular fiction took part in shaping local memory.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the opening chapters first to become familiar with the characters and the period, then move into the main plot.
  2. Prepare a brief history of colonial New York and compare it with the place names and family settings in the novel.
  3. Watch for the recurring orange ribbon and note how its symbolic meaning changes.
  4. After finishing, compare it with historical novels by other American women writers of the same period to observe similarities and differences in narrative mode.

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

FAQ

Is this book in Chinese or English? According to the available information, the book is in English and comes from the Project Gutenberg public-domain ebook collection, so the text is the English original; no Chinese translation information is available.
When is the story set? The subtitle identifies it as a romance of New York, and given Barr's usual choice of material, the story is set amid the early colonial and founding period of New York; the exact date should be confirmed by the reader in the text.
Is it suitable for learning English? It can be used as extensive reading material, but the sentence patterns and vocabulary of nineteenth-century popular fiction carry the marks of their time and there is considerable sentimental description; it is best suited to readers with some foundation in English who are reading it for literary purposes.

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About the author

Barr, Amelia E., 1831-1919 Author

Amelia E. Barr (1831–1919) was an Anglo-American novelist active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because public information is limited, details of her early life, education and nationality cannot be confirmed and are not speculated upon here. The collection holds 26 of her works, chiefly historical romances and regional fiction, along with an autobiography. Remember the Alamo draws on the Texas War of Independence, The Bow of Orange Ribbon is set in New York, while A Daughter of Fife, Christine: A Fife Fisher Girl and An Orkney Maid focus on Scottish fishing villages and island life, as do A Knight of the Nets and Jan Vedder's Wife. Her autobiography, All the Days of My Life, can be read alongside her novels. Barr wrote in a plain style, often portraying ordinary people's fortunes and family loyalties; her books found a wide readership in the English-speaking world and are now mainly of interest to students of nineteenth-century popular and regional fiction.