Marion Harland's Complete Etiquette
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers studying modern American social culture and the history of daily life
- Translation and writing researchers interested in the style of English etiquette writing
- General readers who enjoy browsing old public-domain books and learning about the spirit of an era
- Language learners who need original English etiquette material
Not a good fit for
- Readers seeking practical, contemporary social-etiquette guidance
- Those sensitive to or uncomfortable with old-era hierarchies and gender ideas
- Beginners who read only Chinese and are unused to English originals
Reading tips
- Start with the table of contents and pick the chapters most relevant to daily life, such as visitors, letters, and the dining table.
- After each chapter, note points that clearly conflict with contemporary values and keep a comparative record.
- Copy etiquette expressions from the book onto cards as a store of old-style English usage.
- You need not read it all; choose chapters by interest and treat it as a slice-of-an-era book to browse.
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
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
FAQ
Can the etiquette rules in this book still be followed directly today?
Is this book difficult for readers with only average English?
Is this book suitable as a reference for writing or translation?
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
Virginia Terhune Van de Water (1865–1945) was an American author and editor of etiquette literature. Public information about her is limited, and many details of her life are not widely known to general readers. She is best known in connection with Marion Harland's Complete Etiquette, a work dealing with social manners, household etiquette, and everyday conduct, belonging to the American etiquette-guide tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such books were typically practical and clearly organized, addressed to ordinary households, and written in a direct, earnest tone to help readers handle the details of social situations. Her work is representative of the etiquette literature of its time and offers a useful window into the social norms and gender roles of the period. Given the limited sources, her personal history and the full range of her writing remain to be further examined.
