In the Library
Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser, 1900
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 11 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 47
- Length
- Length 156k 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.
In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.
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.
If you like this, try
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser
An American Tragedy does the same thing, but tightens Dreiser's fascination with money and social climbing into a courtroom drama that ends in a death sentence.
£1.99
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth does the same thing, but reverses the direction, watching a woman with every social advantage slide slowly toward ruin instead of rising.
£1.99
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby does the same thing, but trades Dreiser's cold economic machinery for a lyrical dream, watching a self-made man reach for a woman who is really wealth itself.
£1.99
About the book
Caroline Meeber steps off the train in Chicago with four dollars, a small trunk, and her sister's address on a slip of paper, and by the last page she is one of the most talked-about women in New York, while the man who wrecked his own life to keep her is dead in a rented room with the gas turned on. Dreiser refuses the bargain Victorian fiction always struck: no fallen woman punished, no moral tacked to the end, just desire and money working themselves out across two lives moving in opposite directions. George Hurstwood does not fall because he is wicked. He falls because comfort, once lost, is nearly impossible to borrow back, and Dreiser tracks his slide from saloon manager to strikebreaker to beggar with a patience that makes it feel less like tragedy than gravity. Carrie rises the same way, pulled upward by wanting rather than virtue, until the last pages find her alone in a rocking chair by her window, rich and restless, dreaming of a happiness this book never once lets her feel.