A Modern Instance by William Dean Howells

"A Modern Instance" by William Dean Howells is a novel published in 1882. It traces the disintegration of a marriage between Bartley Hubbard and Marcia Gaylord as they move from small-town Maine to Boston. What begins as romance gradually unravels through moral weakness, jealousy, and emotional imbalance. As the marriage collapses, those around them become entangled in the wreckage. This groundbreaking work was the first major American novel to treat divorce as a realistic possibility, establishing Howells as a champion of literary realism. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

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About this eBook

Author Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920
Title A Modern Instance
Note Wikipedia page about this book: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modern_Instance
Credits Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Olaf Voss, David Widger
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Reading Level Reading ease score: 79.3 (7th grade). Fairly easy to read.
Language English
LoC Class PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature
Subject Marriage -- Fiction
Category Text
EBook-No. 8203
Release Date
Most Recently Updated Dec 23, 2025
Copyright Status Public domain in the USA.
Downloads 449 downloads in the last 30 days.
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