Domestic Fiction PDF EPUB

A Beautiful Alien

Downloads: Under 100
First published: 1899
Pages: 139

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About this book

Julia Magruder's turn-of-the-century novel follows Christine Dallas, an Italian woman raised in a convent, who marries a quiet American after a hurried courtship at a European resort and sails with him to a home where she knows no one. Her husband speaks only English; her own is halting and heavily accented, so the marriage settles into silence rather than companionship. Albert Noel, a lawyer with an artist's eye who first notices her aboard the steamer from Europe, becomes the friend who watches her loneliness harden as the couple sinks into poverty and her infant falls dangerously ill. The alien of the title is a foreigner, not a visitor from another world. Magruder writes a restrained study of a woman worn thin by an ill-matched marriage and a country she cannot speak to.

Available edition: text of Project Gutenberg eBook #25989. The PDF has 139 pages; the EPUB is reflowable.

About the author

Julia Magruder

Julia Magruder (1854–1907) was an American novelist, born in Charlottesville, Virginia, who moved to Washington, D.C. as a small child and lived largely there.