A Chance Acquaintance (Unabridged) ebook

William Dean Howells's A Chance Acquaintance (1873) is a finely controlled social novel about the unexpected meeting of Kitty Ellison, a spirited young American, and Miles Arbuton, a cultivated Bostonian whose inherited assumptions expose the class and regional prejudices of post–Civil War America. Set amid travel through New England and Quebec, the narrative transforms tourism, conversation, and romantic hesitation into instruments of moral and social observation. Howells's prose is lucid, ironic, and attentive to the nuances of ordinary speech, anticipating the mature American realism with which he is most closely associated. Rather than relying on melodramatic coincidence, the novel locates drama in manners, self-deception, and the difficult negotiation between feeling and social convention. William Dean Howells (1837–1920), born in Ohio, became one of the central figures of nineteenth-century American letters. His experience as a journalist, diplomat, and influential editor of The Atlantic Monthly brought him into close contact with the literary and social debates of his era. A committed advocate of realism, he sought to represent contemporary life honestly while examining the ethical consequences of privilege, marriage, and cultural prejudice. A Chance Acquaintance reflects his interest in the tensions between provincial America, cosmopolitan aspiration, and inherited status. Readers interested in the emergence of American realism, the history of the nineteenth-century novel, or the literary representation of travel will find this work especially rewarding. Its restrained romance and penetrating social comedy make it an excellent introduction to Howells's humane, skeptical, and quietly radical art.