Halima and the Scorpions
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who want a light introduction to early 20th-century English short fiction
- Self-learners who need free public-domain English texts for extensive reading
- Casual readers interested in exotic settings and suspenseful atmosphere
- English majors using it as supplementary material for short-narrative analysis
Not a good fit for
- Serious readers expecting in-depth literary study or classic masterpieces
- Readers with weak English who need a Chinese parallel text to understand the original
- Readers who prefer contemporary pacing and long-form development
Reading tips
- Read through once to follow the plot, then a second time to mark how environmental description echoes characters' psychology.
- When period diction or cultural background blocks you, skip ahead and look it up after finishing, so the reading rhythm is not broken.
- Read it alongside other Hichens stories to compare his recurring techniques and variations in exotic subjects.
- After reading, retell the story's conflict in your own words to check whether you truly understand the characters' motives
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
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About the author
Robert Hichens (1864–1950) was a British novelist, with 28 of his works held in this collection. Public information about him is limited, and details of his life are difficult to verify, but his writings offer a sense of his literary range. His best-known novel, The Garden of Allah, is set against an exotic desert landscape and blends romance with religious reflection; The Green Carnation became known for its thinly veiled portrayal of Oscar Wilde and the aestheticist circle around him. He also wrote novels such as The Woman with the Fan, The Dweller on the Threshold, Bella Donna, The Figure in the Mirage and The Call of the Blood, as well as a travel book on the Near East, The Near East: Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople. His work often draws on foreign settings, social manners and psychological suspense, with carefully developed plots that combine popular readability with the tastes of their time, earning him a place in early twentieth-century British popular fiction.
