The Silver-Embroidered Robe

Maryan, M., 1847-1927Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
488K words
Chapters
49

Tags

Foreign Language Books Foreign Literature Legendary LivesFate and FortuneFamily BondsLove EntanglementsAristocratic SecretsComplex HumanityTender SentimentFrench Narrative19th CenturyEmbroidered Robe

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.La Robe brodée d'argent by M. MaryanAuthor: Maryan, M., 1847-1927,Language: French, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Jan 31, 2010

Editor's review

This is a public-domain novel in French by M. Maryan, an author active in the second half of the nineteenth century whose work belongs to the French literary tradition. The title means “The Silver-Embroidered Dress,” and both title and categorization suggest a plot-driven novel of manners, suitable as reading material for learners at the introductory or intermediate level. As a Project Gutenberg electronic text, its greatest value lies in being free, searchable, and easy to excerpt and compare: learners can use it as practice reading a full-length French text, while literary enthusiasts can use it to encounter a less familiar tradition of French popular fiction. There is no need to read quickly; it is better suited to steady chapter-by-chapter progress, paying attention to narrative rhythm and to colloquial expressions in dialogue. Because it lacks modern annotations and an introduction, readers need a certain French vocabulary and the habit of looking things up independently; a dictionary or bilingual reference tool is recommended, and the book can serve as material for training in both language and literature.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read one chapter first to gauge the density of unfamiliar words, then decide whether to read intensively or extensively, so as to avoid giving up midway.
  2. Keep a vocabulary notebook, record expressions that recur chapter by chapter, and review them together after finishing.
  3. Pair the text with French audio resources or a bilingual edition, using listening and reading together to ease the difficulty of long sentences.
  4. After every few chapters, write a three-to-five-sentence summary in French, which both practices output and checks comprehension.

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

FAQ

Is this book suitable for learning French? It is suitable for learners who already have an intermediate foundation. It is a complete long-form French text that can train long-sentence comprehension and vocabulary building, but it has no annotations or glossary, so beginners may easily become frustrated. It is best used with a dictionary or bilingual reference tool, progressing steadily chapter by chapter, as extensive reading material rather than an intensive textbook.
Will the electronic edition differ from the paper edition? The book comes from Project Gutenberg and is a public-domain electronic text, with content based on the source edition used. Different editions may differ in layout, chapter divisions, and occasional wording, but the main story is the same. If quoting from it, it is advisable to note the source and check the specific passage.
Do I need to know the author’s background before reading? Extensive preparation is not necessary. It is enough to know that the author was roughly active in the nineteenth-century French literary milieu; unfamiliar period details encountered while reading can be looked up as you go. Reading the main text first and filling in background afterward is often easier than struggling through reference material first.

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

Maryan, M., 1847-1927 Author · French · 1847–1927

M. Maryan (1847–1927) was a French writer of children's literature. Her real name and any commonly used English name are not clearly recorded in publicly available sources, and she published mostly under a pen name. Born in 1847 and deceased in 1927, she lived across the mid-to-late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, a period when children's reading in France was becoming more widespread and when periodicals and illustrated books flourished. Only one of her works is currently held in this collection, La Robe brodée d'argent (which may be rendered as The Silver-Embroidered Robe); the title suggests a fairy-tale or legendary flavour, in keeping with the fashion of the time for imaginative stories and moral instruction aimed at young readers. Because public information is limited, her full life, complete body of work and precise influence are difficult to describe in detail, yet the surviving work shows that she left her mark on French-language children's literature, and her use of a pen name reflects the common practice of women writers entering the literary world under assumed names in that era.