The Girls of Pietola

Meriläinen, Heikki, 1847-1939Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
769K words
Chapters
77

Tags

Foreign Language Books Foreign Literature Fate and FortuneWomen's FateFamily BondsQuiet ProseLocal NarrativeExotic CultureFolk CustomsFinnish Life

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.Pietolan tytöt by Heikki MeriläinenAuthor: Meriläinen, Heikki, 1847-1939,Language: Finnish, Class: PH: Language and Literatures: Finno-Ugrian and Basque languages and literatures, Release Date: Jul 26, 2015

Editor's review

Pietolan tytöt is a novel by the Finnish author Heikki Meriläinen, written in Finnish and published as a public-domain eBook by Project Gutenberg. Meriläinen long focused on Finnish rural and common people's life, and his works mostly draw on local society and family relations. The book revolves around the daughters of the Pietola family, presenting through daily life, courtship, and family choices the social landscape and ethical values of nineteenth-century rural Finland. The narrative style is plain and realistic, emphasizing dialogue and details of local life, with a clear realist and regionalist flavor. For readers learning Finnish or studying rural narrative in Finnish literature, the book offers both linguistic and cultural material; however, its language is the original Finnish and it lacks modern annotation, so non-Finnish readers need tools or a translation. As a public-domain eBook, it is suitable as supplementary reading for language learning and literary study.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Finnish learners can read one chapter through first, mark unfamiliar words, then return to close-read the dialogue sections.
  2. Before reading, briefly learn about the social structure and family values of nineteenth-century rural Finland.
  3. Use histories of Finnish literature to understand the book within the tradition of regionalist realism.
  4. If the language barrier is too high, first find a translation or summary to grasp the plot, then return to the original to appreciate the language.

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

FAQ

Is there a Chinese translation of this book? The available information only states that it is a Finnish public-domain eBook and does not mention a Chinese translation. Chinese readers who do not know Finnish need to find a translation themselves or use translation tools; otherwise they cannot readily use the original.
What subjects does Meriläinen mainly write about? According to the information, he lived from 1847 to 1939, and his works fall under Finnish language and literature. This book centers on rural family life and the lives of daughters, and is realistic narrative close to local society rather than fantasy or experimental writing.
Is this book suitable for learning Finnish? It can serve as supplementary material. It is a complete long narrative with much dialogue and many scenes of daily life, which helps build everyday vocabulary; but it was written early, and its language style is distant from contemporary Finnish, so it is best used alongside modern textbooks and dictionaries.

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

Meriläinen, Heikki, 1847-1939 Author

Heikki Meriläinen (1847–1939) was a Finnish author. Public information about his life and education is limited, and nine of his works are held in the collection. Judging from his representative works, he drew mainly on Finnish rural and folk life, as seen in Kuppari-Maija, Korpelan Tapani, Korpelan seppä, and Pietolan tytöt, focusing on the daily life, labor, and fate of ordinary people with a distinctively regional and realistic flavor. Some works state their purpose in a subtitle: Korpelan Tapani is described as a depiction of folk life, Huutolaistyttö as a depiction of hard times, and Kahleeton vanki as a biographical depiction, showing that he often presented folk conditions in a documentary, lifelike manner. His subjects include village craftsmen, farm girls, poor children, and the fortunes of ordinary people, and his plain language emphasizes scenes and human circumstances, offering readers a valuable literary window into Finnish rural society.