The Mandarin's Fan

Fergus Hume (Fergusson Wright Hume)Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.1
Word count
423K words
Chapters
43

Tags

English Originals Mystery and Suspense Suspense ThrillerFate and FortunePsychological TacticsCriminal PsychologyExotic Culture

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.The Mandarin's Fan by Fergus HumeAuthor: Hume, Fergus, 1859-1932,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jun 7, 2011

Editor's review

The Mandarin's Fan is a plot-driven novel by the Scottish-Australian author Fergus Hume, released free of charge as an ebook by Project Gutenberg. Hume was known for his popular late-Victorian suspense narratives, and this book revolves around a symbolic fan, weaving together an Oriental object, family secrets, and the fates of its characters in a way that offers the typical pleasures of plot-driven fiction. The significance of the Project Gutenberg edition lies in making this early English popular literature accessible again as a public-domain ebook, free to read on multiple devices and easy for researchers to search. It suits fragmented reading time—commutes, travel, or bedtime—as an entry point into the tastes of late nineteenth-century English-language popular fiction. A caveat: this is the original English text, with period vocabulary and narrative pacing; read it as a plot-driven entertainment rather than a literary classic, and the experience will be lighter.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the opening chapters first to gauge the narrative pacing and character relationships before deciding whether to read straight through.
  2. Keep a vocabulary notebook for period expressions and descriptions of objects, combining reading with language learning.
  3. Read alongside background material on late nineteenth-century British popular fiction to understand its plot conventions.
  4. Use the ebook's search function to trace each appearance of the fan, the story's central object.

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

FAQ

Is this book in Chinese or English? Is it hard to read? This is an original English-language ebook released by Project Gutenberg, with no Chinese translation. The sentence structure reflects late nineteenth-century narrative habits; the vocabulary is not especially difficult, but there are many period expressions. Readers with university-level English can read it through with a dictionary, and those who only want the plot can start with chapter summaries before tackling the text.
What are the features of the Project Gutenberg edition? Project Gutenberg provides free public-domain ebooks, and this book is one of its releases, available free of charge and readable on common electronic devices. Its advantages are zero cost, easy searching, and portability, but it usually lacks the notes, introductions, or translator's annotations of a modern edition, so readers need to fill in background knowledge themselves.
What kind of writer was Fergus Hume? Fergus Hume (1859–1932) was a Scottish-born writer long active in Australia, known for popular novels with intricate plots. His works rely heavily on suspense and coincidence to drive the story, making them suitable for understanding the tastes of English popular fiction of that era rather than for judging by the standards of literary classics.

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

Fergus Hume (Fergusson Wright Hume) Author · English · 1859–1932

Fergus Hume (1859–1932) was a British novelist. Born in England, he moved with his family to New Zealand as a child, studied at the University of Otago and qualified as a lawyer. In 1885 he went to Melbourne, and the following year he published The Mystery of a Hansom Cab at his own expense, achieving instant fame; the book is regarded as a bestselling classic in the history of detective fiction. In 1888 Hume returned to England to settle, and thereafter devoted himself to detective and suspense fiction, producing more than a hundred works in his lifetime, of which 66 are held in this collection, including The Silent House, The Gentleman Who Vanished and The Spider. He died in Essex in 1932.