The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses From Women

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.0
Word count
38K words
Chapters
4

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Social ObservationFamily BondsHumor ReliefSatirical StyleFemale 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 Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses From Women by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Nov 8, 2004

Editor's review

This book mirrors the companion volume of male responses and presents, in concentrated form, the replies made by women on the subject of marriage. As an English public-domain ebook from Project Gutenberg, its significance lies chiefly at the documentary and textual level: readers can observe how women's voices enter a debate about marriage, and how they borrow, invert or answer existing arguments. Short and clearly structured, it works well as supplementary material for courses in English literature, and for readers interested in differences of gendered perspective who wish to read it alongside the male responses. Readers should attend to its rhetorical strategies and historical context and treat it as a historical text rather than directly applicable life advice. For readers seeking low-cost access to public-domain English texts, it is a light and engaging read.

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Reading tips

  1. Read through once to grasp the overall line of response, then return to key passages.
  2. Read against the male responses item by item, noting differences in arguments and tone.
  3. Excerpt representative sentences and practise restating their views in your own words.

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

FAQ

Is this book a novel or an argumentative text? It is closer to a set of responses and arguments on the subject of marriage than to a novel with a continuous plot. Readers should not expect a developing story but should attend to how the arguments are organised, its tone and its rhetoric, treating it as a text of its period.
Why is it recommended to read it together with the male responses? The two books belong to the same series and respond to the same theme from female and male perspectives respectively. Reading them side by side makes the differences in focus, and the echoes or rebuttals between them, clearer, and helps readers avoid understanding the text from a single standpoint.
What should readers note about reading the electronic edition? Public-domain ebooks are plainly formatted and may lack modern annotations. Readers are advised to keep a dictionary at hand; when encountering period expressions, first infer from context and then verify. They may also note recurring phrases with pen and paper to grasp the whole.

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About the author

Various Author

Various is not a real person but a collective attribution used in book cataloging and databases for works with multiple authors, commonly applied to anthologies, compilations, or publications with too many contributors to list individually. On this Chinese book site, this attribution covers as many as 3,387 titles, spanning encyclopedic entries, historical documents, and trial records. Representative works include several volumes of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the record of the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Available public information is limited: nationality, birth and death dates, and common categories are not clearly recorded, making it difficult to summarize a unified writing style or personal biography. Readers should understand it as a cataloging convention rather than a single author.