Miss McDonald
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in nineteenth-century American literature and women's fiction
- Readers who want the original English text of a public-domain Project Gutenberg book
- Readers seeking a text on family ethics for reading-group discussion
- Literature students studying the narrative conventions of popular fiction
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer fast pacing, strong plots, or modern suspense
- Readers with limited English reading ability who want a Chinese translation
- Readers who need detailed annotations and a scholarly introduction
Reading tips
- Read the first few chapters first to sort out the relationships, then proceed chapter by chapter to avoid confusing the characters.
- Keep a character list and note changes in kinship and emotional ties as you go.
- Slow down at long passages of commentary and note how the narrator judges women's circumstances.
- Read alongside other domestic novels by Holmes to compare similarities and differences in subject and narrative method.
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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FAQ
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About the author
Mary Jane Holmes (1825–1907) was a popular nineteenth-century American novelist who found a wide readership in her day. Public information about her early life and education is limited, but her output was considerable: this site holds twenty-one of her works, which suggests how active she was in the book market and among readers of her time. Her representative novels include The English Orphans, ‘Lena Rivers, Bad Hugh, Family Pride, Cousin Maude, Maggie Miller, Gretchen, and Tempest and Sunshine. These stories are mostly drawn from domestic life and emotional entanglements, often turning on orphaned origins, family ties, pride and suffering, secrets and reconciliation. Their plots are eventful, their tone gentle, and their sensibility plainly sentimental and moralizing. Written for a broad popular audience and especially welcomed by women readers, her novels offer a useful window onto the character of nineteenth-century American popular fiction.
