In the Library
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
Stephen Crane, 1893
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 19
- Length
- Length 23k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
About the book
A boy stands on a heap of gravel in Rum Alley, flinging stones at the howling children of Devil's Row, and it is very nearly the tenderest scene in the book. That is the world Maggie Johnson is born into: smashed furniture, a mother roaring in her chair, neighbours crowding the hall to watch. Stephen Crane gives her one astonishing line, that she blossomed in a mud puddle, and then lets a bartender in a swaggering coat undo her, because Pete is the only elegance anyone has ever shown her. What Crane saw, at twenty-one, borrowing money to print the book himself under a false name, is that nobody here is a villain. Her own family throws her into the street on a point of respectability, sobbing over their honour, and then goes on with supper. The last pages hand you a mother's forgiveness and let you work out for yourself what it is worth.