Project Gutenberg's Pink and White Tyranny, by Harriet Beecher Stowe

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Title: Pink and White Tyranny
A Society Novel

Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe

Release Date: May 14, 2004 [EBook #12354]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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PINK AND WHITE TYRANNY.

A Society Novel

BY

MRS. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

1871.

AUTHOR OF "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN," "THE MINISTER'S WOOING," ETC.

"Come, then, the colors and the ground prepare;
Dip in the rainbow, trick her off in air;
Choose a firm cloud before it fall, and in it
Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute."

POPE.

PREFACE.

My Dear Reader,--This story is not to be a novel, as the world
understands the word; and we tell you so beforehand, lest you be in
ill-humor by not finding what you expected. For if you have been told
that your dinner is to be salmon and green pease, and made up your
mind to that bill of fare, and then, on coming to the table, find that
it is beefsteak and tomatoes, you may be out of sorts; _not_ because
beefsteak and tomatoes are not respectable viands, but because they
are not what you have made up your mind to enjoy.

Now, a novel, in our days, is a three-story affair,--a complicated,
complex, multiform composition, requiring no end of scenery and
_dramatis personae_, and plot and plan, together with trap-doors,
pit-falls, wonderful escapes and thrilling dangers; and the scenes
transport one all over the earth,--to England, Italy, Switzerland,
Japan, and Kamtschatka. But this is a little commonplace history,
all about one man and one woman, living straight along in one little
prosaic town in New England. It is, moreover, a story with a moral;
and for fear that you shouldn't find out exactly what the moral is,
we shall adopt the plan of the painter who wrote under his pictures,
"This is a bear," and "This is a turtle-dove." We shall tell you in
the proper time succinctly just what the moral is, and send you off
edified as if you had been hearing a sermon. So please to call this
lit