Deerbrook
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~220,000 words · 1,035 passages
Cite this work
- APAHarriet Martineau. (n.d.). Deerbrook. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/harriet-martineau/deerbrook
- MLAHarriet Martineau. "Deerbrook." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/harriet-martineau/deerbrook.
- ChicagoHarriet Martineau. Deerbrook. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/harriet-martineau/deerbrook.
What it is about
A novel of English village life: two sisters arrive in a small community, and what follows is above all how gossip, envy and fear of other people's opinion decide lives.
Context and history
Published in 1839. Martineau is better known as a populariser of political economy and as the person who condensed Comte into English — a work that is also in this catalogue — and this novel tends to be left in the background. It is worth reading for one thing: it takes village life as its material without idealising it in the least, and puts at its centre a woman who works and thinks, at a time when the English novel did not often do so.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
________________________________________________________________________ Harriet Martineau was the daughter of a Norwich textile manufacturer of Huguenot descent--hence the name and trade. In 1829 the bank in which she, her mother and her sisters, had placed their money, failed and she was forced to earn a living through writing, at which she was very talented, particularly on political issues, such as the poverty facing a family on the death of the wage-earner. In 1839, after her travels in America, she wrote two long novels, of which Deerbrook was one, and a book about Toussaint L'Ouverture the other. This book, therefore gives great insight into the lives of upper middle class families of the mid nineteenth century. No one in families these days talks to the rest of the family in the polite, perhaps over-polite, terms used in this book. For this reason, though it was not meant to be taken as such, this book is a true social document. ________________________________________________________________________ DEERBROOK, BY HARRIET MARTINEAU. CHAPTER ONE. AN EVENT. Every town-bred person who travels in a rich country region, knows what it is to see a neat white house planted in a pretty situation,--in a shrubbery, or commanding a sunny common, or nestling between two hills,--and to say to himself, as the carriage sweeps past its gate, "I should like to live there,"--"I could be very happy in that pretty place." Transient visions pass before his mind's eye of dewy summer mornings, when the shadows are long on the grass, and of bright autumn afternoons, when it would be luxury to saunter in the neighbouring lanes; and of frosty winter days, when the sun shines in over the laurustinus at the window, while the fire burns with a different light from that which it gives in the dull parlours of a city. Mr Grey's house had probably been the object of this kind of speculation to one or more persons, three tim← Back to Harriet Martineau