The Captives
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who enjoy twentieth-century English fiction and character psychology
- Literary readers interested in the theme of freedom and constraint who are willing to read slowly
- Students who need public-domain English novels for reading practice
- Novel readers who want to understand Walpole’s narrative style
Not a good fit for
- Readers seeking strong suspense and fast-paced plotting
- Readers who read only contemporary popular fiction and have little tolerance for classic narrative pacing
- Beginners hoping to get a complete literary-historical assessment from a single book
Reading tips
- Read the first five chapters first to clarify the relationships and what “captivity” specifically refers to before deciding on pace.
- Keep a simple character chart and note as you read to avoid confusing roles.
- Watch for recurring spatial images; they often hint at shifts in the characters’ psychology.
- After finishing, revisit the key turning points and compare the characters’ choices before and after.
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
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- 14
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FAQ
Is The Captives a suspense or thriller novel?
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Comments
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About the author
Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) was a British novelist, with 14 of his works held in this collection. His interests as a writer were wide-ranging; representative works include Fortitude, The Cathedral: A Novel, The Golden Scarecrow, The Duchess of Wrexe, Her Decline and Death: A Romantic Commentary, Joseph Conrad, Jeremy, The Gods and Mr. Perrin: A Tragi-Comedy, and The Captives. Besides full-length novels, he wrote Jeremy, a story centred on a boy's growth, and a study of Conrad as a writer. His fiction often follows characters' inner struggles and moral choices in difficult circumstances, combining romantic colour with realistic detail, with carefully developed plots and fairly full psychological portrayal of his characters. Public information about his life, education and honours is limited, and no inferences are made here.
