A Chance Acquaintance

Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.4

Word count: 336K words
Chapters: 34

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.A Chance Acquaintance by William Dean HowellsAuthor: Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Jun 11, 2006

Editor's review

A Chance Acquaintance is an early, short novel by Howells that already displays the subject matter he would later master: the cultural clashes and self-discovery of Americans traveling in Europe. The story turns on a chance meeting, with the conversation, misunderstandings, and sense of propriety among characters in social settings generating the narrative tension in a restrained, ironic tone. For today's readers its value lies in observing how nineteenth-century American fiction handled the psychological gap between the New World and the Old, and in the author's delicate handling of vanity and sincerity. The Project Gutenberg edition makes the original text easy to consult and is suitable as a selection for American literature courses or English reading material, though the plot moves slowly and requires patience to enter the characters' social world.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Undergraduates and graduate students in nineteenth-century American literature who need selected texts
Self-learners who want to improve their English long-form reading through public-domain fiction
Literary readers interested in cross-cultural travel writing and social satire
Researchers studying Howells's early work and his turn toward realism

Not a good fit for

Readers of genre fiction who prefer strong plots and fast pacing
Readers hoping for clear moral conclusions or inspirational lessons
Beginners with little English reading experience who would struggle with nineteenth-century sentence patterns

Reading tips

Learn about the setting and travel background before entering the dialogue; this makes the nuances of the social scenes easier to grasp.
Watch for propriety and self-presentation in the characters' speech, marking details that reveal personality as you read.
After finishing, revisit the key meeting and misunderstanding passages to sort out the relationships and shifts in attitude.
For English study, choose dialogue-heavy chapters for close reading and retelling practice.

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.

FAQ

Is this novel suitable for English beginners?

Not really for complete beginners. It is a nineteenth-century novel with period sentence patterns and vocabulary, and the dialogue carries social implications. It is better attempted after some experience with long-form English reading, or with an annotated edition and introduction.

Do I need to know about Howells before reading?

Systematic study is not necessary, but knowing that he focused on American social manners and realist writing helps. Read with the question of how characters present themselves in society; this suits the book better than chasing the plot.

How does this book relate to the author's other works?

It is one of Howells's early novels and already touches on the international themes and social observation he would return to. Afterwards you can compare it with his more mature works to see how his irony and character portrayal developed, but you need not read the others first to understand this one.

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About the author

Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920 Author

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was an American author and literary editor, with 107 works held in the collection. His writing spans novels, travel books, memoirs, and literary essays, and his representative works include My Mark Twain, Indian Summer, A Boy's Town, A Modern Instance, and A Hazard of New Fortunes. Howells drew on close observation of everyday life, writing in a plain style with gentle irony and attending to moral questions and human situations amid social change; his travel book Venetian Life and his memoir Literary Friends and Acquaintance record his journeys and personal recollections of American literary figures. Public information is limited, so biographical details are not elaborated here; readers may turn to the works above to learn about his subjects and style.