A Letter Book
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- English literature enthusiasts interested in the English epistolary and prose traditions
- Readers who want to understand George Saintsbury's critical taste through an anthology
- Students of literature and history with good English reading ability who can research background independently
- General readers who enjoy essay-style anthologies and fragmented reading
Not a good fit for
- Beginners who struggle with English and need a Chinese translation or sentence-by-sentence notes
- Writers expecting a systematic letter-writing course or practical models
- Readers who only want a complete letter collection by a single author and dislike anthologies
Reading tips
- Read the editor's introduction and the table of contents first to grasp the overall approach of the anthology before moving on to individual letters.
- Read two or three letters at a time, paying attention to tone and historical context; there is no need to read straight through in order.
- When encountering unfamiliar figures or events, look them up as you go to fill in the historical context.
- Keep a notebook to copy representative sentence patterns and appreciate the expressive features of the epistolary form.
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
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
FAQ
Whose letters are collected in this book?
What does Saintsbury write in the book?
Is this book suitable for learning English writing?
What should I pay attention to when reading the Gutenberg edition?
Comments
Find this book
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
George Saintsbury (1845–1933) was a British literary historian and critic. Public information on the details of his life is limited; he is known chiefly for his many works on literary history and prosody. The library holds twelve of his works, including the two volumes of A History of the French Novel, a historical manual of English prosody, a history of nineteenth-century literature, a history of Elizabethan literature, a short history of French literature, and studies of Sir Walter Scott and Matthew Arnold. His writing is distinguished by solid scholarship and clear organization; he was adept at assessing authors and genres within a general historical framework, and his surveys of prosody and of the novel are especially accomplished. These works long served as references for the study of English and comparative literature and remained influential into the twentieth century.
