The whole shelf
All free summaries — page 263
47,382 public-domain books, summarised. Page 263 of 988.
Priests, Women, and Families
Jules Michelet
The quiet sanctity of the domestic hearth is a battleground, where the intimate influence of the priest clashes with the natural bonds of the family.
Quotes and Images From The Novels of Georg Ebers
Georg Ebers
A noble mind can never swim with the stream, and in this collection, the echoes of antiquity offer a timeless map of the human condition. These fragments serve as an invitation to consider the delicate balance between the weight of history and the fleeting sweetness of the present moment.
Rembrandt's Amsterdam
Frits Lugt
The canals and cobblestones of the seventeenth-century Dutch capital pulse with a new vitality when viewed through the eyes of its most famous resident, the painter Rembrandt.
Romantic castles and palaces
Unknown
Stone walls hold the echoes of history, from the silent gaze of a watchful Doge to the iron-willed ambition of a Medici prince, revealing how architecture mirrors the turbulence of human power.
Shakespeare the Boy: With Sketches of the Home and School Life, Games and Sports, Manners, Customs and Folk-lore of the Time
W. J. (William James) Rolfe
A portrait of Elizabethan life, this book reconstructs the world of a young William Shakespeare, grounding his formative years in the tangible details of 16th-century Warwickshire.
Sixpenny Pieces
A. Neil (Albert Neil) Lyons
This narrative offers a candid, unsentimental portrait of life among the London poor, centered on a weary but dedicated doctor navigating the messy realities of his patients’ daily struggles.
Telepathy, Genuine and Fraudulent
W. W. (William Wortley) Baggally
A meticulous investigator examines the boundary between genuine mental phenomena and the clever deceptions of stage performers in early 20th-century spiritualist culture.
The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories
Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
A celebrated author retreats to an ancestral English estate only to find his life haunted by a child who mirrors a ghost from the past.
The Bronze Eagle: A Story of the Hundred Days
Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness
The return of the deposed Emperor from exile sets the stage for a desperate struggle between political loyalty and personal devotion. In the shadow of a changing France, old enemies and lovers must reconcile their pasts.
The Burgomaster's Wife
Georg Ebers
Amidst the desperate, starving siege of 1574 Leyden, a husband and wife struggle to reconcile their personal devotion with the crushing demands of a city fighting for its very existence.
The Cock and Anchor
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
A young woman finds herself ensnared in a web of deceit and forced marriage, relying on a long-lost love to navigate the shadows of a dangerous and atmospheric eighteenth-century Dublin.
The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
This pioneering autobiography strips away the artifice of eighteenth-century memoir to expose the raw, unvarnished nerves of a man who felt the world far more deeply than he understood it. It stands as the foundational document of modern confessional writing.
The Crimes of England
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
HOOK This analysis strips away diplomatic pleasantries to argue that the true path to patriotism lies in a cold-eyed confession of one's own country’s historical sins.
The Ecclesiastical Orders of Knighthood
James Herman Van der Veldt
This authoritative guide traces the origins, evolution, and modern legacy of the Catholic Church’s chivalric and military honors. It offers a clear, structured survey of the traditions that bridge medieval crusading ideals and contemporary papal recognition.
The Garden Without Walls
Coningsby Dawson
The struggle to reconcile desire with the suffocating expectations of Victorian morality haunts the life of a young man caught between his upbringing and his restless spirit. This narrative explores the tension between the safety of the garden and the unpredictable, dangerous world beyond its walls.
The Hispanic Nations of the New World: A Chronicle of Our Southern Neighbors
William R. (William Robert) Shepherd
The long, complex struggle for independence across the Americas remains a defining chapter in the formation of the modern world. This chronicle maps the shift from colonial rule to the tumultuous birth of sovereign nations.
The history of silhouettes
Emily Jackson
The silhouette—that humble, elegant shadow of a face—captures the ghost of a personality in a single, unadorned outline. This account traces the art from its origins as a social grace to its scientific and mechanical ends.
The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor
Russell H. Conwell
This biography traces the journey of a restless American spirit, from the quiet Pennsylvania countryside to the far reaches of the globe, capturing the life of a poet and traveler dedicated to the pursuit of truth.
The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2
Gilbert White
A patient observer documents the hidden rhythms of a Hampshire village, revealing how the lives of birds, plants, and local creatures mirror the intricate, changing pulse of the natural world.
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898
Unknown
HOOK This collection of seventeenth-century colonial records offers a stark, unvarnished window into the daily friction between Spanish civil authority and the religious orders operating in the Philippine archipelago.
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 51, 1801-1840: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century
Unknown
These records chronicle the complex, often fractured transition of the Philippines through the early nineteenth century. They document a colonial apparatus struggling to reconcile rigid imperial mandates with the shifting realities of a distant archipelago.
The Pirate, and The Three Cutters
Frederick Marryat
The sea remains the ultimate testing ground for human character, where the thin veneer of social standing dissolves against the relentless pressure of waves, duty, and lawless ambition.
The Provinces of the Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian. v. 2
Theodor Mommsen
The Roman Empire was not a monolith, but a shifting mosaic of provinces, each wrestling with the pressures of imperial administration, local identity, and the constant shadow of the frontier.
The Seventh Regiment: A Record
George L. Wood
The Seventh Ohio Volunteer Infantry traces the arc of the Civil War from the first call to arms to the final, somber homecoming of its fallen commanders. Written in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, this record transforms the raw, lived experience of soldiers into a permanent tribute to their endurance and…
The Soul of the Soldier: Sketches from the Western Battle-Front
Thomas Tiplady
In the mud and roar of the Western Front, a chaplain finds that the soul of the common soldier is revealed not in grand speeches, but in the quiet endurance of life’s most profound trials.
The Spider Web: The Romance of a Flying-Boat War Flight
T. D. Hallam
The North Sea becomes a high-stakes chessboard where silent, winged predators hunt the silent, steel ones, forever changing the nature of naval warfare.
The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12): Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes
Unknown
The Great War emerges here as a sprawling, mechanical tragedy, where human endurance is measured against the cold calculus of artillery, gas, and territorial gain. It is a chronicle of attrition, charting the brutal shifts in power across the Western and Eastern Fronts during the desperate months of 1915.
The Whirl: A Romance of Washington Society
Foxcroft Davis
In the glittering, high-stakes arena of Washington, D.C., a British diplomat finds his carefully calculated life—and his disdain for American marriages—upended by an unexpected love.
Ukrainian literature
Clarence Augustus Manning
A sweeping survey of a resilient national voice, this history traces how a people’s literature survived centuries of political erasure to reclaim its rightful place in the global tradition.
Wappin' Wharf: A Frightful Comedy of Pirates
Charles S. (Charles Stephen) Brooks
A band of retired pirates finds their quiet life of shoreline villainy disrupted when a mysterious, disguised royal infiltrates their ranks. This playful, theatrical romp balances the grit of a maritime underworld with the whimsical sensibilities of a bedtime story.
An Arrow in a Sunbeam, and Other Tales
Sarah Orne Jewett
This collection gathers gentle, moralistic stories centered on the lives of ordinary people, emphasizing the quiet, transformative power of kindness and personal reflection in late 19th-century society.
Beauties and Antiquities of Ireland: Being a Tourist's Guide to Its Most Beautiful Scenery & an Archæologist's Manual for Its Most Interesting Ruins
Thomas O'Neill Russell
This guide bridges the divide between the scenic splendor of the Irish landscape and the profound, often turbulent layers of its deep archaeological past. It invites the reader to look beyond modern tourist routes to uncover the ghosts of ancient kings, saints, and forgotten citadels.
Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See
C. H. B. (Charles Henry Bourne) Quennell
This guide offers a scholarly yet accessible tour of a foundational Norman masterpiece, blending architectural analysis with the turbulent history of the East Anglian episcopate. It serves as both a practical manual for the visitor and a concise chronicle of a cathedral’s endurance.
Birds of Prey
M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon
Ambition and avarice wear the mask of mid-Victorian propriety in this intricate drama of inheritance, hidden agendas, and the fragile nature of trust.
Bosambo of the River
Edgar Wallace
This episodic adventure follows a wily, self-appointed chief navigating the volatile politics of a river territory under the watchful eye of a British colonial administrator. It is a portrait of power, opportunism, and the uneasy friction between indigenous leadership and foreign rule.
Cripps, the Carrier: A Woodland Tale
R. D. (Richard Doddridge) Blackmore
A simple man’s quiet life is upended when a mysterious disappearance forces him to navigate a web of local secrets, stubborn prejudices, and long-standing woodland rivalries.
Expositor's Bible: The Book of Jeremiah, Chapters XXI.-LII
W. H. (William Henry) Bennett
A prophet stands alone against a crumbling kingdom, bearing a message of inevitable ruin and the promise of a radical, interior faith. This commentary navigates the final, turbulent years of Judah through the eyes of its most maligned witness.
Fanny Campbell, The Female Pirate Captain: A Tale of The Revolution
Maturin M. (Maturin Murray) Ballou
A young woman trades her quiet life in a coastal hamlet for the high seas, captaining a brig to rescue her beloved from a foreign prison during the American Revolution.
Flower o' the Peach
Perceval Gibbon
A young woman seeking recovery in the South African Karoo finds her life entangled with a tragic, isolated medical doctor and the fractured lives of the settlers around them.
Fragment of a novel written by Jane Austen, January-March 1817
Jane Austen
A spirited, observant young woman journeys to a rising seaside resort, only to find a community defined by its eccentricities, health-obsessed promoters, and the frantic, often absurd, pursuit of social and financial gain.
Goblin Tales of Lancashire
James Bowker
The ancient hills of England hold secrets that refuse to stay buried, manifesting in the spectral boggarts and restless spirits that haunt the shadows of these northern landscapes.
Greek vase-painting (Griechische Vasenmalerei)
Ernst Buschor
This meticulous history traces the evolution of Greek pottery from prehistoric shards to the peak of classical artistry. It serves as a definitive guide to the techniques, regional schools, and aesthetic shifts that defined an era.
Hilda's Mascot: A Tale of "Maryland, My Maryland"
Mary E. (Mary Eliza) Ireland
This story traces the interconnected fates of a young girl and a bitter woman, bound together by the search for belonging in the Maryland countryside. It is a gentle, moralistic tale of legacy, redemption, and the unexpected ways lives touch one another.
Historically Famous Lighthouses: CG-232
United States. Coast Guard
Lighthouses serve as the solitary, enduring sentinels of the American coastline, standing against the relentless forces of nature and the steady march of technological progress. This factual survey documents their history, construction, and eventual transition toward automation.
I will repay
Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness
The French Revolution becomes a theater of high-stakes deception and narrow escapes as a mysterious rescuer orchestrates the salvation of those trapped by the guillotine’s shadow. This tale of intrigue pits the rigid idealism of the revolutionary state against the daring, unconventional maneuvers of the legendary…
In the World
Maksim Gorky
A young man navigates the harsh, often predatory landscape of the Russian working class, seeking a way to transcend his environment. He transforms his observations of human cruelty and struggle into a quiet, enduring resolve to live for something better.
In Unfamiliar England: A Record of a Seven Thousand Mile Tour by Motor of the Unfrequented Nooks and Corners, and the Shrines of Especial Interest, in England
Thos. D. (Thomas Dowler) Murphy
This account of a seven-thousand-mile motor tour through Britain offers a spirited, observant portrait of the country’s less-trodden paths at the dawn of the automobile age.
Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of Baroness Orczy
Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness
These tales of historical intrigue and mystery follow brave souls navigating the treacherous political landscapes of revolutionary France, seventeenth-century Flanders, and beyond.