Gladys, the Reaper

Beale, AnneProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.7
Word count
946K words
Chapters
95

Tags

English Originals Classic Works Country LifePastoral SceneryFate and FortuneFamily BondsLove TriangleHeartwarming NarrativeVictorian EraFemale Protagonist

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.Gladys, the Reaper by Anne BealeAuthor: Beale, Anne,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Mar 10, 2005

Editor's review

Gladys, the Reaper is a novel in English by Anne Beale, presented here as a public-domain Project Gutenberg e-book. The available data identify it only as English literature and provide no plot summary, so no specific inferences about the story should be made. As a version, it is an early digitized English-literature text, freely available and full-text searchable, and suitable as reading practice in nineteenth-century English fiction. The work is substantial and its language carries the marks of its period, so it requires some patience with English. It is better treated as a corpus item for literary history or as extensive reading than as an introductory book relying on a guide. Readers are advised to sample the opening chapters to see whether the narrative pace and style suit them before deciding to read through or select passages, and to use background material on the author and period for support.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Sample the first three chapters to judge whether the language difficulty and narrative pace suit you.
  2. Read alongside material on the author's life and nineteenth-century English society.
  3. If the length is daunting, set a fixed daily page target and keep notes on character relationships.
  4. Use the e-book's search function to look back at names and plot threads, reducing obstacles to reading.

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
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
  74. 74
  75. 75
  76. 76
  77. 77
  78. 78
  79. 79
  80. 80
  81. 81
  82. 82
  83. 83
  84. 84
  85. 85
  86. 86
  87. 87
  88. 88
  89. 89
  90. 90
  91. 91
  92. 92
  93. 93
  94. 94
  95. 95

FAQ

Is this book suitable for English beginners? Not really. It is a long nineteenth-century English novel whose sentence patterns and vocabulary carry period features, and it is lengthy. It suits readers with some experience of English literature in the original; beginners might start with simplified editions or short stories.
What are the advantages of using the e-book? The Project Gutenberg version is freely available and allows full-text search and copying of passages, making it easy to look up characters and chapters and convenient for textual comparison by researchers. Keep the source information, and check an authoritative edition before formal citation.
There is no synopsis; how do I judge whether it is worth reading? Sample the opening chapters to get a feel for the narrative perspective, language density and pace, then decide whether to read it through. You can also consult chapters of literary history on nineteenth-century English fiction to learn the common themes and methods of such works.

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

Beale, Anne Author · Welsh · 1816–1900

Anne Beale (1816–1900) was a nineteenth-century Welsh novelist and poet whose work drew largely on Welsh rural life, showing a keen eye for the countryside and the everyday circumstances of ordinary people. Her surviving representative work is the novel Gladys, the Reaper, which sets its characters and their fortunes against a rural background and reflects her enduring interest in regional and country themes. Because public information is limited, details of her life, the course of her writing career, and the reach of her influence in her own time are difficult to establish, and only one work by her can currently be confirmed. Overall, her writing brought the landscape and people of rural Wales into fiction and poetry, offering later readers a useful point of reference for understanding nineteenth-century Welsh local life and literary culture.