The Beth Book

On a grey June day, Mrs. Caldwell longs for a fire and a book—but cannot afford either. Her husband’s whisky, however, must be ready, even as she prepares to give birth to her seventh child.

Sarah Grand’s late-19th-century novel begins in a cramped domestic world where a mother’s exhaustion is called her “lot,” and questioning the rules is treated as improper. Delicate, once accomplished, and now worn down by work and childbirth, Mrs. Caldwell struggles to keep the household going while her husband measures her against the lively young woman he married. The child on the way is Elizabeth—Beth—and Grand hints that the small comforts denied her mother may matter far beyond this one difficult day. What might change if women were allowed to think about the causes of their misery, not merely endure it?

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.