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Elsie Venner

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Book Overview: 

Bernard Langdon is close to earning his degree in medicine when his family finds itself in financial difficulties, forcing Langdon to interrupt his studies for a time in order to earn money with which to fund the rest of his degree. He therefore leaves Boston in order to teach at a school in a village in the area. One of his students is Elsie Venner, a seventeen year-old girl, who is avoided by her peers and keeps apart. Somehow, Elsie exerts a great fascination on Langdon, as there is something distinctly different about her with her strangeness and quick temper.

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .Deacon Soper was directed, of course, to the ladies' dressing-room, and her husband to the other apartment, where gentlemen were to leave their outside coats and hats. Then came Mr. and Mrs. Briggs, and then the three Miss Spinneys, then Silas Peckham, Head of the Apollinean Institute, and Mrs. Peckham, and more after them, until at last the ladies' dressing-room got so full that one might have thought it was a trap none of them could get out of. In truth, they all felt a little awkwardly. Nobody wanted to be first to venture down-stairs. At last Mr. Silas Peckham thought it was time to make a move for the parlor, and for this purpose presented himself at the door of the ladies' dressing-room.

"Lorindy, my dear!" he exclaimed to Mrs. Peckham,—"I think there can be no impropriety in our joining the family down-stairs."

Mrs. Peckham laid her large, flaccid arm in the sharp angle made by the black sleeve which held the bony limb her husband offere. . . Read More

Community Reviews

A dreadfully boring waste of a premise with potential. Also phenomenally racist, even for something written in 1861.

I cannot do it. I am not gonna finish this one. Talk about verbosity! I just don't care and none of the characters mean anything to me, in fact I rather dislike all of them. I made it through 134 pages but I am putting an stop to this one. That being said, I do have a few quotes I want to remember.

I have finally finished this novel, which is a strange mixture. I was attracted to it because the blurb on the back said it was a strange tale about a woman poisoned in the womb with snake venom, who therefore has some snake-type characteristics, and that it satirises puritanism.
However, the framin

Perhaps if Poe was a philosopher he would have written a book like Elsie Venner. Despite it's gothic premise (a child is born after her mother is bitten by a snake and then takes on the animal's characteristics), it spends very little time on that aspect of the story and instead discusses religion,