The whole shelf
All free summaries — page 463
34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 463 of 714.
Eli: First published in the "Century Magazine"
Heman White Chaplin
An honest Cape Cod fisherman single-handedly holds out against a hostile jury to save an innocent neighbor from prison.
Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697)
Samuel Wesley
Can a Christian poet abandon classical myths, embrace sacred truth, and construct an enduring epic around the life of Jesus Christ?
Eric, or Little by Little
F. W. (Frederic William) Farrar
A bright, noble-hearted boy enters an island boarding school full of promise, only to be dragged down by small moral compromises into ruin and tragedy.
Following the Flag, from August 1861 to November 1862, with the Army of the Potomac
Charles Carleton Coffin
A eye-witness view of blood, mud, and military hesitation reveals the grinding reality of the American Civil War's eastern front.
Frank Brown, Sea Apprentice
Frank Thomas Bullen
A young lad enters the merchant service and learns that the sea demands everything a boy can give before it makes him a man.
Frank Merriwell's Backers
Burt L. Standish
A fearless young prospector defends his Arizona gold mine against outlaws, corrupt syndicate agents, and deadly betrayals in the rugged American Southwest.
Gloriana
Dixie, Florence, Lady
A brave woman disguises herself as a man to enter public life, leading a movement for total equality between the sexes against a corrupt establishment.
Glyn Severn's Schooldays
George Manville Fenn
An Indian prince's jewelled heirloom vanishes from an English school. Two friends who know wild beasts and distant lands better than their classmates set out to quiet an escaped elephant and clear an innocent name.
Gold Seekers of '49
Edwin L. (Edwin Legrand) Sabin
A snowy doorway in St. Louis yields a dying stranger’s secret, launching a boy and his ailing father on a hazardous journey toward the California gold fields.
Goya
François Crastre
Charcoal sketches scrawled across a roadside wall by a fifteen-year-old peasant boy ignite one of the most fiery, unyielding careers in European art.
Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848
Various
A vivid mosaic of nineteenth-century American imagination, this issue blends Venetian romance, high-seas action, quiet domestic tragedy, and sharp literary criticism into a single, vibrant monthly canvas.
Harpsichords and Clavichords
Cynthia A. (Cynthia Adams) Hoover
Intricate mechanical craft meets musical evolution in an era when finger pressure and plucked quills dictated the boundaries of keyboard expression.
Harrison's Amusing Picture and Poetry Book
Unknown
With a turn of the page, a child steps into a bright world of rhyming fables, cautionary tales, and quiet observations on nature.
Hetty's Strange History
Helen Hunt Jackson
Love can sacrifice every claim except the truth, yet a mistaken heart will sometimes throw even life away to prove its devotion.
Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece
George Greenwood
A clear-headed cavalry officer dismantle the myths of Victorian horsemanship, replacing rigid military dogma with a gentle, two-handed approach to riding grounded in plain physics and animal psychology.
History of Beasts
Unknown
A simple, moralizing survey of the animal kingdom guides young readers through creaturely habits to uncover profound lessons about obedience, divine providence, and Christian virtue.
Home Fires in France
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Ordinary people, caught in the devastating gears of World War I France, quietly rebuild destroyed lives, hold families together, and confront catastrophic losses through quiet acts of everyday resilience, courage, and unexpected human solidarity.
India and Indian Engineering.: Three lectures delivered at the Royal Engineer Institute, Chatham, in July 1872
J. G. (Julius George) Medley
Deploying European engineering logic within an ancient, unfamiliar environment demands practical ingenuity, constant adaptation, and absolute personal integrity.
Influenza
Warren T. (Warren Taylor) Vaughan
A global plague strikes suddenly, baffling the medical establishment, exposing the limits of public health, and forcing scientists to search the past to understand a devastating present.
Jack's Ward
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
A lost child, a pair of counterfeiters, and a young lad's sheer grit collision course through nineteenth-century New York and Philadelphia in this classic tale of street-level virtue and sudden fortune.
Janice Day
Helen Beecher Long
When a spirited girl from the Midwest arrives in a drowsy Vermont village, her quiet determination slowly stirs an entire community out of its stubborn rut.
Little Mexican & Other Stories
Aldous Huxley
A young man moves through an alien world of adult eccentricities, quiet cruelties, and unfulfilled desires, mapping the fragile illusions that keep human beings afloat.
Little Miss Grasshopper
Johanna Spyri
Impulsive small steps lead a child over a cliff, where only quiet obedience keeps her alive until rescue comes.
Magda: A Play in Four Acts
Hermann Sudermann
Rebellion clashes with domestic tyranny when a world-famous opera singer returns to her provincial home after twelve years of exile, bringing modern independence into direct collision with patriarchal rule.
Main Street: (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Centuries of New England history unspool inside a single room as a determined showman turns the crank of a painted paper panorama.
Memories of Canada and Scotland
Argyll, John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, Duke of
A collection of formal addresses, celebratory verse, and ancient Gaelic lore bridges the Old World and the New through the vision of a nineteenth-century statesman.
Napoleon's Appeal to the British Nation, on His Treatment at Saint Helena
Emperor of the French Napoleon I
Stripped of imperial power and confined to a damp, rat-infested hovel on a remote tropical rock, a fallen monarch issues a fiery protest against his captors, exposing the harsh realities of his island exile.
Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850
Various
An extraordinary mosaic of nineteenth-century curiosity, this single issue of an iconic antiquarian journal captures the British mind at work—arguing over Shakespearean verse, tracing ancient folklore, and debating the precise origin of forgotten regional slang.
Odd people
Mayne Reid
Across windswept deserts, frozen tundras, and dense rainforests, human ingenuity takes startlingly varied shapes to survive against the harshest element.
'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation
Aaron Hill
In born aptitude and careful study must align to achieve true creative brilliance, standardizing artistic rules only suffocates the imagination, and poetic imagery demands vital, unadorned strength to touch the human heart.
Old Court Life in Spain, vol. 2/2
Frances Minto Dickinson Elliot
A tragic air hangs over medieval Spain, where royalty is defined less by grace than by bloodshed and ambition.
Old Friends and New
Sarah Orne Jewett
Quiet coastal villages and lonely interior homes set the backdrop for these subtle studies of nineteenth-century New England life, where quiet daily routines yield to sudden moments of vulnerability, remembrance, and unexpected connection.
On Picket Duty, and Other Tales
Louisa May Alcott
Behind military encampments and quiet New England homes, ordinary men and women endure the quiet trials of devotion, temptation, and sacrifice during wartime.
Other Main-Travelled Roads
Hamlin Garland
Life on the nineteenth-century American prairie is a hard-bitten round of unremitting toil, where human devotion must constantly contend against isolation, stubborn pride, and the grinding drudgery of the soil.
Our Friend the Dog
Maurice Maeterlinck
A brief reflection on the bond between humans and dogs, observing a young bulldog’s life to explore devotion, morality, and our unique place in nature.
Our Sailors: Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign
William Henry Giles Kingston
Bound to the sea by duty and daring, a nineteenth-century fleet carries its sailors into remote rivers, arctic icefields, and desert sands. They risk everything not for easy glory, but out of sheer habit of mind.
Pearl of Pearl Island
John Oxenham
A sun-drenched coastal escape breaks an old sorrow and blossoms into a second chance at love.
Phyllis, a twin
Dorothy Whitehill
Bound together after years apart, twin sisters navigate high school social politics and a city detective plot in early twentieth-century New York.
Picked up Adrift: Illustrated
James De Mille
A group of schoolboys adrift in the Gulf of St. Lawrence must survive the sea and their own guardian's wild schemes.
Planet explorer
Murray Leinster
A lone engineer armed only with physics, field equipment, and stubborn self-respect stands between fragile human colonies and immediate, bizarre extinction.
Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870
Various
Enter the irreverent world of Gilded Age journalism, where political satire, parodied serials, and theatrical gossip collide to expose the absurdities of post-Civil War America.
Puss in Boots, Jr., and the Good Gray Horse
David Cory
A booted, courtly feline rides a faithful gray steed through a world where classic nursery rhymes live side by side, searching for the famous father he has never managed to overtake.
Rambles in an Old City: comprising antiquarian, historical, biographical and political associations
Susan Swain Madders
A historical tapestry of Norwich weaves together medieval chivalry, religious evolution, and local folklore into an engaging portrait of an ancient English city.
Scanners live in vain
Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
A man surrenders his senses to survive the agonizing void of deep space, only to discover that the breakthrough rendering his sacrifice obsolete will cost him his purpose, his brotherhood, and very likely his life.
Slavery and the Constitution
William I. (William Ingersoll) Bowditch
Enslaved human beings cannot be held as property without stripping them of literacy, legal marriage, and political rights, a cruelty that the United States Constitution directly protects.
Subspace Survivors
E. E. (Edward Elmer) Smith
The starship Procyon drops out of space into a fatal hazard, leaving nine survivors trapped aboard a drifting hulk who must master an unknown physical field to survive.
Tales and Novels
Maria Edgeworth
A silver tongue and a scheming heart turn family life into a high-stakes chess match where every gesture conceals a strategy.
Tales of the Five Towns
Arnold Bennett
Ambition, pride, and domestic friction collide in smoke-grimed pottery towns where ordinary lives carry unexpected weight.