A Dream of Fair Women

Inspired by Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women (1384), both works being visions dealing with the misfortunes of illustrious women but otherwise bearing no resemblance to each other, this effort by Tennyson was originally titled Legend of Fair Women and published in 1832.  The poem was subsequently revised multiple times, excessive tinkering with completed works being something for which the author was known.  The original sixteen lines were removed as being either irrelevant or unnecessary, and then eventually this illustrated version was published in Boston in 1880.

This illustrated edition of the poem is enhanced with thirty seven illustrations.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.