UNLIMITED Audiobooks and eBooks

Over 40,000 books & works on all major devices

Get ALL YOU CAN for FREE for 30 days!

Majorie Daw

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Book Overview: 

The story, which is written entirely as a series of letters between two friends, concerns the invention of an imaginary young woman, Marjorie Daw, by one correspondent, intended as a harmless diversion. When the other correspondent becomes madly smitten with the imaginary Ms Daw, the first correspondent is forced to confess his ruse.

How does All You Can Books work?

All You Can Books gives you UNLIMITED access to over 40,000 Audiobooks, eBooks, and Foreign Language courses. Download as many audiobooks, ebooks, language audio courses, and language e-workbooks as you want during the FREE trial and it's all yours to keep even if you cancel during the FREE trial. The service works on any major device including computers, smartphones, music players, e-readers, and tablets. You can try the service for FREE for 30 days then it's just $19.99 per month after that. So for the price everyone else charges for just 1 book, we offer you UNLIMITED audio books, e-books and language courses to download and enjoy as you please. No restrictions.

Book Excerpt: 
. . .e to yourself a large white house just across the road, nearly opposite our cottage. It is not a house, but a mansion, built, perhaps, in the colonial period, with rambling extensions, and gambrel roof, and a wide piazza on three sides—a self-possessed, high-bred piece of architecture, with its nose in the air. It stands back from the road, and has an obsequious retinue of fringed elms and oaks and weeping willows. Sometimes in the morning, and oftener in the afternoon, when the sun has withdrawn from that part of the mansions, a young woman appears on the piazza with some mysterious Penelope web of embroidery in her hand, or a book. There is a hammock over there—of pineapple fibre, it looks from here. A hammock is very becoming when one is eighteen, and has golden hair, and dark eyes, and an emerald-colored illusion dress looped up after the fashion of a Dresden china shepherdess, and is chaussee like a belle of the time of Louis Quatorze. All this splendor g. . . Read More

Community Reviews

Very readable, and not at all the surprise ending I was anticipating!

How lovely to find a story by this author who I first discovered as a young teen. When people complain of books being too dense, I'll point to this novella, a collection of fictional letters and telegrams about an irritable man who slips on lemon peeling and fractures his leg. A volley of letters co

This story happens in 1872. John Flemming slips on a lemon peel and ends up with a fractured fibula. He doesn't take kindly to the forced idleness of being confined to his couch just as summer is getting underway and he is so surly that he chases his own sister away and begins pelting his servant wi

"Marjorie Daw" is a short story first published about 1869. I read it in the 1960's. It is about two friends exchanging letters as one of them recovers from an injury. One friend keeps up his injured friends spirits by making up a story about a young woman. His good intentions backfire ...more

Some reviewers here are impressed by the surprise ending. I'm surprised they're impressed.