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All free summaries — page 251
13,367 public-domain books, summarised. Page 251 of 279.
Memoirs of Bertha von Suttner: The Records of an Eventful Life (Vol. 2 of 2)
Bertha von Suttner
A relentless campaigner crisscrosses a fin-de-siècle world of diplomatists and monarchs, recording the practical mechanics of a movement determined to replace war with international law.
Miss Billy's Decision
Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
An engagement meant to usher in a lifetime of harmony founders when a young woman mistakes her fiancé’s artistic focus for growing indifference and decides that true love requires sacrificing her own happiness to set him free.
Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty
John William De Forest
A Southern belle’s fiery allegiance to the Confederacy is tested when war uproots her life, forcing a choice between the dazzling promises of a dashing officer and the steady devotion of a quiet Northern soldier.
A Grammar of the English Tongue
Samuel Johnson
A clear-sighted eighteenth-century guide to the structural mechanics of a living language, written with a scholar's rigor and a pragmatic eye for actual usage.
Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains
Catharine Parr Strickland Traill
Lost in the trackless forests of Upper Canada, three young pioneers must rely on their courage, forest craft, and mutual devotion to survive the wilderness.
Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920)
Carl Van Doren
An ambitious attempt to chart the modern novel as it moves from sentimental regionalism into the raw, unsparing grip of naturalism.
In Defence of Harriet Shelley
Mark Twain
When literary biography transforms into partisan defense, historical truth often gets swept aside to shield a cherished romantic icon from his own moral failings.
Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough
William Morris
A restless yearning for ideal beauty and human connection drives a journey through love, grief, and political struggle.
Psychology and Achievement: Being the First of a Series of Twelve Volumes on the Applications of Psychology to the Problems of Personal and Business Efficiency
Warren Hilton
Unlocking human potential requires looking beyond physical stamina to master the hidden, subconscious forces that directly drive all real-world action and success.
Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
An animal body is a machine driven by chemical combustion, where food and oxygen transform into vital force.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 48, October, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
A diverse collection of Civil War-era American writing captures a nation in conflict through personal travelogue, historical allegory, dark narrative fiction, and patriotic analysis.
The Laughing Cavalier: The Story of the Ancestor of the Scarlet Pimpernel
Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness
In seventeenth-century Haarlem, a broke, lighthearted soldier of fortune accepts a murky assignment to abduct a wealthy merchant's daughter, only to find himself entangled in political treason, unexpected honor, and romantic devotion.
The Planet Savers
Marion Zimmer Bradley
When a deadly epidemic threatens the cold world of Darkover, a suppressed personality is artificially awakened to lead a desperate trek across freezing mountains into the treetop cities of an alien race.
The Poor Scholar: Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of
William Carleton
On a harsh Irish hillside swept by freezing rain, a peasant father and his teenage son dig for tiny potatoes on a barren, high-rent farm. Driven by filial love and a hunger for learning, the boy sets out on foot toward Munster with a satchel of books strapped to his back.
The Saint
Antonio Fogazzaro
A repentant sinner abandons his worldly life to seek spiritual purification, only to find himself at the stormy intersection of divine love, ecclesiastical politics, and the relentless devotion of the woman he left behind. <Image alt="Cover of Antonio Fogazzaro's novel El Santo showing a mountain monastery"…
Enough rope: poems
Dorothy Parker
Underneath a veneer of shimmering light verse and jaunty meter lies a sharp, unyielding inventory of human romantic disillusionment, self-mockery, and emotional survival.
Fossil plants, Vol. 1
A. C. (Albert Charles) Seward
A rigorous botanical framework pierces the geological record to reveal how prehistoric plant life links ancient environments with the living world.
Lord Ormont and His Aminta
George Meredith
A boy and girl drawn together in youth discover that the laws of Victorian society matter far less than the laws of their own growth.
The Clique of Gold
Emile Gaboriau
A young woman is driven from her home by a scheming adventuress, while her fiancé sails into a web of state-sponsored traps in the Far East.
Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Literary portraits drawn from personal memory illuminate the eccentricities, sudden laughter, and quiet discipline of the nineteenth century’s most vital authors.
Charles Robert Maturin: His Life and Works
Niilo Idman
A dark, forgotten corner of literary history opens up to reveal a brilliant, erratic Irish romantic whose wild terror-tales enchanted Lord Byron and shaped European gothic fiction.
Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham
Elizabeth Raikes
A visionary educator quietly transforms Victorian womanhood by building a powerhouse institution of rigorous academic learning from scratch.
Gunboat and Gun-runner: A Tale of the Persian Gulf
T. T. (Thomas Tendron) Jeans
A small Royal Navy patrol launch battles harsh seas, heat, and ruthless smugglers to intercept illicit arms trafficking in the Persian Gulf.
Letters from Spain
Joseph Blanco White
To understand Spanish society on the eve of foreign invasion and domestic crisis, one must look beyond grand histories into private doubts, sacred rituals, and the silent machinery of absolute power.
Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood)
Marie Bashkirtseff
A prodigiously talented teenager records her unvarnished ambitions, fiery passions, and agonizing anxieties, capturing the exquisite, tumultuous inner landscape of a brilliant youth determined to conquer the world.
Narrative and Lyric Poems (Second Series) for Use in the Lower School
Unknown
A classic Victorian classroom volume opens a window onto the verse that shaped a generation of young readers.
Needlecraft
Effie Archer Archer
A hands-on manual transforms simple thread, fabric, and fiber into an array of handmade treasures.
Our Changing Morality: A Symposium
Unknown
A sweeping re-examination of American relationships reveals how rapid social shifts, industrial shifts, and economic developments have shattered old codes of conduct.
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7: Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One)
Unknown
A grand tour of Italy’s legendary landscapes, monuments, and works of art comes alive through the keen eyes of history's most observant travelers and critics.
State of the Union Addresses
Ronald Reagan
Through eight turbulent years of economic reinvention and Cold War brinkmanship, an American presidency crafts its vision of renewal, free enterprise, and national strength before Congress and the world.
Stories from Everybody's Magazine
Various
A imaginative young girl writes dramatic poetry on beach sand while local schemers manipulate whole communities for financial gain. Across North America and beyond, everyday people navigate the shifting realities of modern life.
The Great Keinplatz Experiment and Other Tales of Twilight and the Unseen
Arthur Conan Doyle
An uncanny blend of Victorian rationalism and the supernatural where scientific precision collides headlong with the unknowable world of spirits, ancient curses, and psychological horror.
The Journal of the Debates in the Convention which Framed the Constitution of the United States, May-September 1787. Volume 2
James Madison
Men arguing in a warm room in Philadelphia slowly hammer out the architecture of a new republic, line by line and vote by vote.
The Mesa Trail
H. (Henry) Bedford-Jones
A broken-down prospector, an indomitable old woman in a rattle-trap car, and a handful of forgotten Indian relics collide in the high New Mexico desert.
The O'Donoghue: Tale of Ireland Fifty Years Ago
Charles Lever
A ruined estate in wild Kerry, a proud family tumbling into bankruptcy, and a country trembling on the brink of rebellion in the 1790s.
The Ontario Readers: Third Book
Ontario. Department of Education
A curated tapestry of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, this anthology blends moral fables, romantic verse, wilderness adventures, and historic encounters into a single instructional tapestry.
Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout
Victor Appleton
A teenager builds a high-speed vehicle in his backyard shop, fights off local bullies and corporate spies, and drives straight into a high-stakes race.
A Collection of Ballads
Andrew Lang
A single stray arrow or a broken word at a doorway turns love into murder and loyalty into a burning tower. Across these ancient songs, men and women face fate with cold steel, desperate magic, and absolute resolve.
Bloody Beaches: The Marines at Peleliu
Gordon D. Gayle
Blasted by blistering heat and entrenched in coral caves, landing troops face a brutal Japanese shift from suicidal charges to deliberate, grueling attrition across a tiny Pacific island.
Memoirs of the life, exile, and conversations of the Emperor Napoleon. (Vol. II)
Las Cases, Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné, comte de
Stripped of power and confined to a remote rock in the South Atlantic, a fallen conqueror turns his final battlefield into a contest for history itself, dictating his legacy through a devoted companion's daily journal.
Natural Wonders
Edwin Tenney Brewster
A living body is a machine made of living jelly, running on sugar and air, constantly repairing itself through the quiet mechanisms of growth and adaptation.
Outline of the history of the English language and literature
Anonymous
A fourteen-hundred-year history of speech and storytelling unfolds as a living organism, showing how a single tongue absorbed foreign invasions, shed its clumsy inflections, and gave shape to the Western imagination.
The Love Poems: (From Les Heures claires, Les Heures d'après-midi, Les Heures du Soir)
Emile Verhaeren
Two souls find sanctuary in a secluded garden, binding their lives together across a journey that deepens from youth’s fiery intensity to old age's quiet, unshakable devotion.
The Pacification of Burma
C. H. T. (Charles Haukes Todd) Crosthwaite
In the wake of the 1885 annexation of Upper Burma, British imperial authorities faced a vast territory torn by insurgency, rival warlords, and unmapped frontiers. This insider's chronicle details the methodical four-year campaign to enforce colonial order across a resistant countryside.
A Writer's Recollections
Ward, Humphry, Mrs.
These reflections offer an intimate window into the intellectual and social landscape of late Victorian England, viewed through the eyes of a pioneering novelist. They capture a vanished world of profound cultural shifts, literary camaraderie, and earnest moral inquiry.
Confessions of a Young Man
George Moore
This record of a restless spirit chronicles the transformation of a sheltered Irish youth into a sophisticated, art-obsessed denizen of the Parisian avant-garde. It serves as a candid, unapologetic map of an aesthetic education.
Ford Manual for Owners and Operators of Ford Cars and Trucks (1919)
Ford Motor Company
This essential guide offers a clear, mechanical blueprint for the early twentieth-century driver, demystifying the internal combustion engine for the layperson. It remains a testament to the pursuit of simplicity in automotive design.
Graham's Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. 2, August 1852
Various
This nineteenth-century miscellany gathers the voices of poets, storytellers, and observers, offering a panoramic view of the Victorian era’s artistic and intellectual preoccupations.