The Water of the Wondrous Isles by William Morris (best ereader for textbooks .txt) ๐
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The Water of the Wondrous Isles is a landmark in fantasy fiction. First published a year after Morrisโs death in 1897 by Kelmscott PressโMorrisโs own printing companyโthe novel follows Birdalone, a young girl who is stolen as a baby by a witch who takes her to serve in the woods of Evilshaw.
After she encounters a wood fairy that helps her escape the witchโs clutches, Birdalone embarks on a series of adventures across the titular Wondrous Isles. These isles are used by Morris both as parables for contemporary Britain and as vehicles for investigating his radical socialist beliefs. As Birdalone travels through the isles she slowly evolves into the embodiment of the Victorian โnew woman,โ embracing hard physical labor, healthy exercise, higher education, socialist values, and financial freedom, while rejecting sexual exploitation, physical abuse of both women and children, and the restrictive sexual mores of the era. This makes her unique in the fantasy fiction of the era as one of the genreโs first examples of a strong female hero.
This socialist-feminist allegory is presented in an Arthurian-style fantasy world complete with magic, witches, fairies, knights both chivalrous and evil, and castles (indeed, anyone doubting the allegorical nature of the work only needs to look at the name of the taleโs main redoubt: โThe Castle of the Questโ). The language is purposefully archaic, reveling in vocabulary drawn from the languageโs Anglo roots; and the prose is lent a hypnotic quality by its lack of quotation marks to offset dialog, and its short chapters characterized by a fairy-tale-narrative voice.
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The Water of the Wondrous Isles
was published in 1897 by
William Morris.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Alex Cabal,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2003 by
David Price
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at
Google Books.
The cover page is adapted from
The Island of Life,
a painting completed in 1888 by
Arnold Bรถcklin.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
April 5, 2020, 1:07 a.m.
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