The Princess

In a ruined abbey, a stone knight wears a rosy silk robe—and a book tells of a woman who burst from besieged walls to fight her foes. What kind of heroine could match her?

On a summer’s day at Sir Walter Vivian’s country house, science demonstrations, games and an old family chronicle mingle beneath the trees. When young Lilia declares that women are kept children by convention and dreams of founding a college for them, her friends turn the challenge into a story: a princess, a prince and a world where the rules of courtship and learning might be overturned. Tennyson’s serio-comic blank verse moves between playful conversation and the grandeur of legend, as questions of women’s education meet the promise of romance. What will happen when their invented princess demands a world of her own?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.