The whole shelf
All free summaries — page 39
30,104 public-domain books, summarised. Page 39 of 628.
Embarrassments
Henry James
An artist attempts to capture a woman’s beauty before her failing sight destroys it, while a dead woman’s ghost visits a grieving lover.
A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins, Volume 2 (of 2)
Johann Beckmann
Every modern comfort, from the streetlights illuminating evening avenues to the socks warming winter feet, traces its lineage through centuries of accidental discoveries, mechanical tinkering, and scholarly confusion. Erudite historical investigation uncovers the intricate origins of human ingenuity.
The Voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin
A young naturalist embarks on a five-year global survey, measuring the subtle forces of nature and recording the precise mechanics of a changing world.
A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse
Sylvester Bliss
Unlocking biblical prophecy requires treating scripture as its own interpreter, decoding ancient symbols into a coherent map of human history and ultimate divine victory.
The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's: The Story of the Work in Hwochow
Mildred Cable
In the early twentieth century, a group of dedicated women carries forward a Christian mission in inland China, documenting the quiet transformations, severe trials, and daily realities of a changing society.
Little Brothers of the Air
Olive Thorne Miller
A quiet, patient observation of bird life reveals that even the smallest creatures possess complex personalities, social structures, and songs worth preserving through close, empathetic study.
The Canterbury Puzzles, and Other Curious Problems
Henry Ernest Dudeney
An intricate labyrinth of mathematical paradoxes, geometric feats, and clever riddles lies disguised behind ordinary stories of medieval travelers, eccentric professors, and coastal mysteries.
The game of life and how to play it
Florence Scovel Shinn
Life is not a brutal battle to be fought, but a game of giving and receiving governed by universal spiritual laws.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
A striking portrait takes on the physical toll of a young man's vices, allowing him to indulge every hedonistic impulse while remaining outwardly unblemished.
The Alchemist
Ben Jonson
When a master of London's underworld moves out during a plague outbreak, three opportunistic schemers transform his vacant house into the ultimate hub for desperate, fortune-seeking dupes.
Molly Brown's Senior Days
Nell Speed
A warmhearted college girl navigates her final year, balancing editorial ambitions, campus high jinks, and a quiet shift in her heart.
Nell, of Shorne Mills
Charles Garvice
A dark-haired young woman from a country mill falls for a hurt stranger who conceals his noble identity, setting off a winding path through society intrigue, misunderstanding, and long separation.
Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine
Edward A. (Edward Augustus) Freeman
A landscape's true history is etched into the stone of its towers, arches, and town walls, waiting for a trained eye to read it.
Memories of Bethany
John R. (John Ross) Macduff
A quiet Judean village becomes the sanctuary where human grief meets divine compassion, transforming a family's deepest tragedy into an enduring testament of hope and resurrection.
Assimilative Memory
A. (Alphonse) Loisette
A distracted mind continuously forgets because it relies on passive repetition rather than active intellectual engagement. True memory requires a systematic method that forces the intellect to stay anchored to everyday perception.
Plays by Anton Chekhov, Second Series
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
An impending storm drives stranded travelers into a roadside tavern, where long-buried resentments, tragic loves, and explosive tempers collide before the night breaks.
The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III
Unknown
A sweeping collection of classic British and Irish prose captures the dynamic range of an era through political debates, intimate personal journal entries, vivid historical portraits, and imaginative reflections.
The Old Curiosity Shop
Charles Dickens
A grandfather's secret gambling obsession drives a gentle young girl into homeless exile across rural England, pursued by grotesque creditors while loyal working-class allies fight in London to clear their names and rescue them from ruin.
History of the English People, Volume VII: The Revolution, 1683-1760
John Richard Green
A nation shakes off absolute monarchy only to find itself navigating the uncharted, turbulent waters of parliamentary rule, religious rift, and global empire.
The Rough Road
William John Locke
A pampered young Englishman raised in cotton wool loses his officer's commission to incompetence, only to find his true character when he enlists as a humble private on the Western Front.
Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
Unknown
A sweeping gallery of martial biography traces how individual discipline, strategic audacity, and sheer force of will shape the rise and fall of nations across centuries of conflict.
Machiavelli, Volume I
Niccolò Machiavelli
Statecraft requires an unyielding gaze at human nature, where the defense of a realm demands both meticulous military discipline and the calculated exercise of sovereign authority.
History of the English People, Volume VIII: Modern England, 1760-1815
John Richard Green
Between the reign of George III and the fall of Napoleon, Britain transformed from an agrarian island into a world-dominating industrial and maritime power.
Where the Souls of Men are Calling
Credo Fitch Harris
In a small town where the shadow of war seems three thousand miles away, a young man's private terror meets the relentless call of public duty. Credo Fitch Harris constructs a poignant study of hidden cowardice transformed into hardened courage on the ruined battlefields of France.
English Past and Present
Richard Chenevix Trench
Language is not a fixed monument, but a living body continually gaining new territory, shedding obsolete parts, and reshaping itself to match the minds of its speakers.
Our Mutual Friend
Charles Dickens
A dead man pulled from the Thames leaves behind a massive fortune, setting off a cascade of deception, romance, and greed across Victorian London. Money transforms everyone it touches, revealing the dark underbelly of a society obsessed with wealth.
The crowd
Gustave Le Bon
An individual in a crowd ceases to be guided by personal reason, surrendering autonomy to collective impulse, hypnotic suggestion, and sweeping emotion.
Blackie & Son's Books for Young People, Catalogue - 1898
Blackie & Son
Victorian publishing comes alive through an opulent, orderly inventory of historical adventures, seafaring yarns, and moral tales crafted for late nineteenth-century youth.
The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI
Unknown
A sprawling, exhaustive record documents two decades of relentless political mobilization, state-by-state legislative battles, and international solidarity that ultimately secured women the right to vote.
Flint: His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes
Maud Wilder Goodwin
A man whose sharp intellect and reserved manners mask a deep capacity for devotion must learn to look past his own cynicism before he can win the woman he loves.
The Bill-Toppers
J. André Castaigne
A child prodigy grows up on a bicycle seat, navigating the high-wire politics, brutal physical demands, and fleeting glory of the international vaudeville circuit.
Camp-fire and Wigwam
Edward Sylvester Ellis
When a young settler is captured by a forest war party, his survival depends not on his weapon, but on the quiet integrity that earns his captor's respect.
Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act
Oscar Wilde
Under a pallid, ominous moon, a young princess becomes obsessively enamored with a imprisoned holy man, setting off a fatal chain of lust, sacred dread, and swift retributive violence.
History of the English People, Volume IV
John Richard Green
A realm in the throes of spiritual transformation navigates plot, persecution, and the threat of invasion as it constructs a fragile new order.
Germinie Lacerteux
Edmond de Goncourt
A maid's life of passion, debt, and despair in 19th-century Paris.
The Fighting Shepherdess
Caroline Lockhart
When an isolated teenage girl in a hostile Montana town resolves to build a sheep empire, she must conquer local prejudice, ruthless range barons, and her own hardened heart to claim her independence.
Antony Gray,—Gardener
LM (Leslie Moore)
A mysterious letter upends a gardener's life, leading him to England, a grand estate, and a web of secrets.
Vice Versa
F. Anstey
A pompous father wishes he were a schoolboy again while holding a magic stone, only to find himself trapped in his son's body and shipped off to a tyrannical boarding school.
The Book of Dragons
E. (Edith) Nesbit
Monsters hatch from nursery storybooks, freeze the North Pole, or swallow entire towns, while resourceful children navigate absurd adult authority and absurdly giant beasts to put the world back in order.
True to His Home: A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin
Hezekiah Butterworth
A tale of Benjamin Franklin's boyhood, weaving fact and fiction to illuminate his early years.
The Problems of Psychical Research: Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal
Hereward Carrington
An investigation into the mechanical forces, hidden mental currents, and physical anomalies of spiritism offers a rigorously scientific framework for the unexplained.
At Aboukir and Acre: A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt
G. A. (George Alfred) Henty
An English youth finds himself swept into the heart of the Mediterranean campaign, forging an unlikely alliance across cultures to survive the clash between French ambition and British naval might.
Starlight Ranch, and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier
Charles King
Rough, wind-scoured, and strictly observed, these stories capture the routine and sudden violence of the nineteenth-century American frontier army, where personal honor and frontier hazards shape every choice.
Elkan Lubliner, American
Montague Glass
A ambitious young immigrant works his way from the cutting room floor of a garment firm to full partnership in New York’s competitive cloak-and-suit trade.
The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886
Various
Through essays spanning medieval monasticism, French secular schooling, Venetian state archives, and modern Irish Home Rule, this issue examines how historical institutions adapt, govern, and preserve order during times of profound political transition.
Athelstane Ford
Allen Upward
A runaway youth plunges into eighteenth-century imperial warfare, chasing an elusive love and confronting a treacherous cousin across the perilous waters of India.
"Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea
Morgan Robertson
A collection of raw, vital tales from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century American merchant marine, where men fight the sea, their captains, and their own rough natures with fists, iron, and stubble.
Little Novels of Italy
Maurice Hewlett
A world of sunlit riverbanks and darkened alleyways unfolds, where passion and vanity clash with saintly innocence across the volatile landscapes of Renaissance Italy.