Elsket

by Thomas Nelson Page

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25 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1891

About the author

Born at Oakland, one of the Nelson family plantations, in the village of Beaverdam in Hanover County, Virginia to John Page and Elizabeth Burwell Nelson. He was a scion of the prominent Nelson and Page families, each First Families of Virginia. Although he was from once-wealthy lineage, after the American Civil War, which began when he was only 8 years old, his parents and their relatives were largely impoverished during Reconstruction and his teenage years. In 1869, He entered Washington College, known now as Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia when Robert E. Lee was president of the college. After three years, Page left Washington College before graduation for financial reasons. To earn money for the law degree he desired, Page taught the children of his cousins in Kentucky. From 1873 to 1874, he was enrolled in the law school of the University of Virginia in pursuit of a legal career. At Washington College and thereafter at UVA, Nelson was a member of the prestigious fraternity Delta Psi, AKA St. Anthony Hall.

Admitted to the Virginia Bar Association, he practiced as a lawyer in Richmond between 1876 and 1893, and began writing. He was married to Anne Seddon Bruce on July 28, 1886. She died on December 21, 1888 of a throat hemorrhage.

He remarried on June 6, 1893, to Florence Lathrop Field, a widowed sister-in-law of retailer Marshall Field. In the same year Page gave up his law practice entirely and moved with his wife to Washington, D.C..There, he kept up his writing, which amounted to eighteen volumes when they were compiled and published in 1912. Page popularized the plantation tradition genre of Southern writing, which told of an idealized version of life before the Civil War, with contented slaves working for beloved masters and their families. His 1887 collection of short stories, In Ole Virginia, is the quintessential work of that genre. Another short-story collection of his is entitled The Burial of the Guns (1894).

Under President Woodrow Wilson, Page served as U.S. ambassador to Italy for six years between 1913 and 1919. His book entitled Italy and the World War (1920) is a memoir of his service there.

He died in 1922 at Oakland in Hanover County, Virginia.

Reviews

[Charles van Buren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles van Buren

TOP 1000 REVIEWER

5.0 out of 5 stars

A tragic romance

April 8, 2019

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

This review is of the free Kindle edition
A Public Domain Book
Publication date: May 12, 2012
Language: English
ASIN: B0082YWNDI

A fine, well written tragic romance set in a sparsely populated region of northern Norway in the 1880's. Page skilfully and sympathetically evokes the Norwegian mountains, a small isolated valley and the two remaining inhabitants, the last of a once great family.

[Miles Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the titular story from the Page's collection of the same name. It's a brooding story about a Virginian traveling in the mountains of central Norway. He encounters mountain folks and learns of their life and a terrible story of love gone wrong. It's good, and I feel somewhat amiss giving it only three stars. This has more to do with Page, who is always good, and never bad, but rarely ever very good.

[Shannon Pritchard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent lore of old

The timeless story of simple mountain folk,living in peace and tranquility, until an untru heart entered their mountain stronghold and brought the betrayal of the worldly