Wharton, Edith: The Valley of Decision, v.1, 6 April 2008.
 

Edith Wharton’s first full-length novel (1902). It is a long-ish historical novel, set in Italy in the late eighteenth century. Italy was not yet unified and was a mass of small states. The ideas of the Enlightenment and French revolutionary thinkers are spreading as far as Italian backwaters. It is the story of Odo Valsecca, the heir – later the duke – of a minor state. He reads Voltaire and meets with freethinkers. How free is a ruler to bring in reformist legislation? Can he override the all-pervasive influence of the Church? Do his subjects actually want to be reformed? Is it worth the effort? And will Duke Odo ever make a life with the woman he loves?

From http://www.enotes.com/valley-decisio...lley-decision:
“This … romance chronicles the rise to power of Odo Valsecca during the intellectual and political tumult which preceded the French Revolution. During his childhood and early manhood, Odo comes in close contact with all the major factions—the peasantry, the clergy, the liberal freethinkers, and the nobility—which have a vital stake in maintaining or subverting the antiquated power structure based on rigid class distinctions and superstitious religious traditions.”

I'm very new to the forum, and I am not sure whether this posting is appropriate - but I thought it is worth mentioning - I have this book online at http://www.webliterature.net/literat...ton/index.html - again, I don't still have a mobile reader (yet to get one) so I don't know whether (but hope that) my site would support the requirements - it is HTML and not PDF...

Still, maybe worth a mention...

The site has a lot of advertisements and you have to download one chapter at a time. If that's a nuisance then it may be better to try elsewhere.

True - and thanks for the feedback.

Some other friends (outside this forum) also thought that the advertisement is a bit too high, so I shall take a bit of time to remove majority of the particularly irritating advertisements (may not be able to remove all due to other constraints but will definitely take the majority away, particularly the ones that create any obstacle to reading). Please bear with me for some time, since this will take a minimum of 5 full working days, and with my professional commitments (my office, not this website which is rather made from my personal hobby) I guess the time will balloon up a bit more. But I am starting the first of those estimated 5 full days right today - I have one full day since today is a Sunday :)

Regarding the HTML part - which is the reason one has to go by chapters - I don't suppose I have much choice. My only hope is the huge content I've managed to gather (and still gathering), which, I hope, would attract readers to read the site!

I'll update once I manage to tune down the advertisements and overhaul the whole 1.7 GB website!

Check it out now - I've got rid of majority of the advertisements :)

I hope it reads better now! I spent the whole week on this and many thanks to my spouse too!

One can still read one page at a time - which is still a negative for a forum like this, but otherwise I hope one would enjoy it more than earlier...