e-Book Daisy Chain download

It's too bad that this book isn't more popular. It is long but I hated to have it end. She is a fantastic author with fantastic character development. It's a very dynamic book and captures all the innuendos of family life. I highly recommend this book!

Print terribly small. But it's about my name in more ways than one. PhD types on Internet make fun of my name when I give a "scholarly" opinion. Now I've got my documented self-defense. Too bad print is so small so I don't have time to read it much. Have to get used to way it is presented.

Written in the mid-19th century, this is a family chronicle about the May family. In the first chapters, their mother is killed and the eldest sister crippled in a carriage accident, leaving Dr May to cope alone with his children. The story focusses particularly on Ethel, a homely but academic and driven girl, who begins by helping the poor and establishing a school for them, but aspires to build a church and encourage them to follow the Bible.
Her elder brother Norman is brilliantly gifted but suffers from a sensitive and depressive nature.
Sister Flora meanwhile aspires to mix with the gentry.
With an underlying moral precept of not seeking one's own glory, the Mays encounter tragedy and joy and improve as individuals.
This is a very long book (600 pages of close type) and although I wanted to know what happened, I don't think I could have got through much more! Some of the characters were a little too unbelievably virtuous. It may be compared to a 'What Katy did' for adults - and I'm sure that Susan Coolidge's saintly invalid Cousin Helen was based on crippled sister Margaret, dispensing words of goodness from her sick-bed!

I would like to add another review for this excellent book. I ended up reading it after I randomly bought 'The Trial' in a used book store--that book (also very good) is sort of the sequel to this one, though sort of not. (I mean Charlotte Yonge's book, not Kafka's, haha.) But anyway: 'The Daisy Chain' is fun, especially if you were (even slightly) the kind of romantic lonely kid who daydreamed about life in one of these huge Victorian families. But it is also pretty interesting prose sometimes (I have since been noticing how many citations from Charlotte Yonge there are in the OED), and even better, the characters all come across as idiosyncratic, non-stereotyped, psychologically real people.

It is also intensely didactic, which has prevented me from recommending it to very many people, which is a shame. Because it's a kind of fraught and learned didacticism where people really suffer and have conversations about things like 'scrupulosity.' (George Eliot was a fan.)

If you really want to know what life in Victorian England was like, read Charlotte Yonge's novels, just like everyone else used to. The Daisy Chain remained on the "must read" list of every English family well into the 1950's. Clothing, manners, morality, faith, love, death, sorrow, combine with a lot of fun, humor, and an unbelievably large family into one of the best experiences of time-travel for pedestrians ever. Not to mention you get to meet Ethel and Dr. May. Read it. You'll see what I mean.