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All free summaries — page 584
34,093 public-domain books, summarised. Page 584 of 711.
Half a Life-Time Ago
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
A woman binds herself to an oath made at her dying mother’s bedside, forfeiting her own youth, her estate, and the only man she will ever love.
History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan: A Grammar of Their Language, and Personal and Family History of the Author
Andrew J. Blackbird
A rare Native voice preserved from the nineteenth century blends deep tribal memory, personal memoir, and linguistic preservation to create a enduring testament of resilience.
Homes of American Statesmen
Various
A journey across the thresholds of early America reveals how domestic private lives forged the public character of a new republic.
How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings
Marianne L. B. Ker
A gentle flower-fairy loses her wings to human thoughtlessness and must discover that true magic springs from selfless devotion rather than quick enchantment.
Impertinent Poems
Edmund Vance Cooke
Every hypocrite eventually meets his match in the mirror, where self-delusion melts into sharp, humorous self-awareness.
Inaugural Presidential Address
Barack Obama
Delivered during a moment of profound national economic crisis and ongoing foreign wars, this speech offers a steady, disciplined reinterpretation of American purpose.
Intercession: A Sermon Preached by the Rev. B. N. Michelson, B.A
B. N. Michelson
In a moment of national devastation, a wartime sermon calls for moral balance, unity across faiths, and self-sacrifice grounded in eternal duty.
Jack the Hunchback: A Story of Adventure on the Coast of Maine
James Otis
A crippled orphan boy and a tiny stray baby wash ashore on the coast of Maine, finding refuge with an aging woman whose quiet faith faces a reckoning.
Jaw Musculature of the Mourning and White-winged Doves
Robert L. Merz
A painstaking comparative study of avian anatomy demonstrates how subtle differences in skull structure and jaw muscles settle long-standing debates over bird classification.
Jill: A Flower Girl
L. T. Meade
Amid the grimy, crowded slums of late-nineteenth-century London, a fiercely devoted flower girl makes the ultimate sacrifice of her own happiness to shield her suffering mother and protect the man she loves.
John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character, Volume 3 (of 3): From the Collection of "Mr. Punch"
John Leech
A mid-Victorian mirror captures the absurdities, vanity, and quiet charm of everyday British life, documenting a rapidly changing world through sharp visual satire and affectionate observation.
Jones of the 64th: A Tale of the Battles of Assaye and Laswaree
F. S. (Frederick Sadleir) Brereton
Driven by sheer grit and unexpected kindness, a parish orphan rises through the ranks of the British army to face the perilous fires of colonial India.
Julius, the Street Boy
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
Rescued from the harsh streets of New York, an ambitious waif travels to the American Midwest, where honesty, steady labor, and quick thinking pave his way toward middle-class respectability.
Keynotes
George Egerton
A woman paces through a quiet forest or rests beside an empty frame, caught between the suffocating demands of conventional duty and the electric, untamable rhythm of her own inner life.
Leonora
Maria Edgeworth
When an artful woman sets out to destroy a virtuous marriage, she discovers that theatrical passion is no match for quiet integrity and self-possession.
Little Masterpieces of Autobiography: Actors
George Iles
A great actor must vanish completely into a role, yet no artist leaves behind a more personal, elusive record of human passion and dedication.
Lost Lenore: The Adventures of a Rolling Stone
Mayne Reid
A boy leaves Dublin to seek his fortune across three continents, chasing gold and surviving the wild frontiers of the nineteenth century in hopes of returning worthy of his lost childhood love.
Louisa Pallant
Henry James
A world-weary bachelor watches his nephew fall for a mesmerizing young heiress, only to be confronted by the girl’s mother, who makes a startling, desperate sacrifice to protect the boy from her own daughter.
Ludvig Holberg, The Founder of Norwegian Literature and an Oxford Student
S. C. (Simon Christian) Hammer
A brilliant young Scandinavian scholar absorbs the intellectual freedom of Enlightenment Britain and returns to transform the literature of his homeland.
Macmillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869
Macmillan & Co.
A fascinating window into Victorian publishing, this document maps the landscape of nineteenth-century intellectual culture through a carefully curated list of histories, biographies, poetry, and classical reprints.
Making a Tennis Court
George E. Walsh
Practical craft meets country-house ideal in this compact manual, which transforms a simple patch of backyard soil into a refined engine of sport and social grace.
Master of His Fate
J. Maclaren (James Maclaren) Cobban
A gifted man maintains his youth by secretly absorbing the vital energy of others, until love reveals his parasitical nature and forces a fatal reckoning.
Melchior's Dream and Other Tales
Juliana Horatia Ewing
Conceited boys, dream-plagued poets, French aristocrats, and frightened country youths discover that the hardest lesson in life is learning to look beyond oneself.
Memoirs of a millionaire
Lucia True Ames Mead
A young woman unexpectedly inherits a vast fortune, turning her quiet life into a bold experiment in social reform and practical compassion.
Minnie's Sacrifice
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Courage, devotion, and racial pride guide a young woman who chooses solidarity with her oppressed people over a life of hidden privilege.
Modern thinkers and present problems
Edgar A. (Edgar Arthur) Singer
Human inquiry constantly wrestles with the tension between scientific mechanism and moral freedom, seeking a personal faith or rational anchor to make sense of an indifferent universe.
Motor Matt's Daring
Stanley R. Matthews
A young mechanic races his custom machine across the Arizona desert to save a gold claim from a schemer who steals by fraud, sabotage, and sheer speed.
Motor Transports in War
Horace Wyatt
In the opening months of World War I, mechanical speed fundamentally reshaped the logistics of continental battlefields.
Mr. Joseph Hanson, The Haberdasher
Mary Russell Mitford
A grandiloquent haberdasher sweeps into a provincial town with flashy salesmanship, only to have his matrimonial ambitions derailed by a local political feud and a surprising personal history.
My Brave and Gallant Gentleman: A Romance of British Columbia
Robert Watson
An aristocratic outcast finds redemption and love in the rugged Canadian wilderness when his past unexpectedly catches up with him.
My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard
Elizabeth Cooper
A noblewoman’s intimate letters track the quiet collapse of traditional China beneath the encroaching tides of Western influence and generational change.
My Northern Exposure: The Kawa at the Pole
George S. (George Shepard) Chappell
In a world of serious polar expeditions, one crew tackles the Arctic with mosquito netting, five-and-ten-cent store novelties, and absolute absurdities.
New Year's Day (The 'Seventies)
Edith Wharton
A scandal exposed in a hotel fire reverberates across decades of New York high society, unraveling a woman's desperate sacrifice for the dying husband who never knew the truth.
Notes and Queries, Number 07, December 15, 1849
Various
Lost in the vast ocean of history, minor facts and literary puzzles find a welcoming shore in a mid-nineteenth-century weekly devoted to communal intellectual discovery.
Notes and Queries, Number 33, June 15, 1850
Various
An open forum for mid-nineteenth-century antiquaries and scholars captures the quirky, collaborative nature of Victorian intellectual life.
Noteworthy Records of Bats From Nicaragua, with a Checklist of the Chiropteran Fauna of the Country
J. Knox Jones
A rigorous zoological field report maps the distribution and ecology of Central American bats, shedding light on a critical geographic bridge for mammalian life.
Old Mines of Southern California: Desert-Mountain-Coastal Areas Including the Calico-Salton Sea Colorado River Districts and Southern Counties
William H. Storms
An examination of the rugged terrain of late-nineteenth-century California reveals the exacting work of a field geologist tracking the state's hidden mineral wealth.
Old Mortality, Volume 2
Walter Scott
A young man trapped between fanaticism and tyranny must navigate the bloody currents of seventeenth-century Scotland to save both his life and his conscience.
Operation Interstellar
George O. (George Oliver) Smith
Faster-than-light travel has conquered space, but humanity remains isolated across the stars by a delay in communication that only one disgraced engineer believes he can bridge.
Our Own Set: A Novel
Ossip Schubin
Rome in 1870 is a glittering arena where highborn vanity and high-society arrogance quietly trample the innocent.
Our search for a wilderness
William Beebe
Dense tropical waterways, roaring howling monkeys, and marching columns of army ants form the living tapestry of two pioneering naturalists charting South America’s wild edges.
Paths of Judgement
Anne Douglas Sedgwick
A quiet, tragic study of misplaced devotion, where noble intentions unravel into guilt and irreversible loss.
Penelope Brandling: A Tale of the Welsh coast in the Eighteenth Century
Vernon Lee
Arriving at her husband's isolated Welsh castle, a young Swiss bride discovers her new family harbors sinister secrets of wrecking and murder that will force her to make a desperate choice.
Picturesque Pala: The Story of the Mission Chapel of San Antonio de Padua Connected with Mission San Luis Rey
George Wharton James
Set in a secluded valley beneath the mountains of Southern California, the story of Pala Chapel traces the enduring struggle of an indigenous people to hold fast to their land, faith, and heritage against centuries of upheaval.
Poems
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Across a collection of impassioned, deeply felt verse, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper crafts a vision of moral duty, racial justice, and spiritual endurance in post-Reconstruction America.
Practical Angora Goat Raising
Unknown
Thriving in rugged brush with glistening white fleeces, Angora goats offer dedicated breeders a unique dual yield of luxurious mohair and fine meat.
Prehistoric man
W. L. H. (Wynfrid Laurence Henry) Duckworth
Deep physical measurements, skull capacities, and geological strata reveal the intricate story of human origins across early Palaeolithic Europe and beyond.
Prison Poetry
Hiram Peck McKnight
A chorus of voice and verse from within nineteenth-century cellblocks reveals how locked doors cannot quiet the human soul.