Round the Sofa, Volume 1
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who enjoy Victorian English literature and want to expand their short-story reading
- Intermediate to advanced English learners who want to engage with original literary texts
- Literature enthusiasts interested in frame narrative structure and everyday ethical themes
- Teachers and readers who need short texts for classroom selections or book-club discussions
Not a good fit for
- Readers looking for tightly plotted, fast-paced stories
- Readers still at the beginning stages of English reading who struggle with nineteenth-century long sentences
- Those who only want Gaskell's major novels and have no interest in her short-story collections
Reading tips
- Read the frame opening first to clarify the relationship between narrators and listeners, then enter the stories one by one
- Read one or two stories at a time, leaving room to absorb the period tone in the dialogue
- When encountering unfamiliar words, read through the paragraph for the gist first, then look them up, to avoid breaking the rhythm
- Read alongside Gaskell's other works to observe the differences between her short fiction and her novels
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
FAQ
Is this book a complete story or a short-story collection?
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What are the practical features of this ebook edition?
Comments
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About the author
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810–1865) was a British novelist of the Victorian era. The library holds 28 of her works, including Cranford, Wives and Daughters, North and South, Sylvia's Lovers, and The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Her writing focuses on daily life in English villages and industrial towns, with a delicate and often humorous touch, and she excels at portraying characters and circumstances across different social classes. Cranford depicts a small-town female community with gentle irony; North and South interweaves industrial conflict between employers and workers with personal feeling; and her biography of Charlotte Brontë is also an important biographical work. Public information is limited, so this note outlines her subjects and style based only on the works held here.
