دانلود رمان انگلیسی “ذهنی از آنِ خودش”

Alexandra Victoria Peterson Bouvier was born in Paris in 1900, the last year of the reign of Queen Victoria of Great Britain. Alexandra’s father was French, and her mother was American. The legendary British monarch had always had particular significance to Alexandra’s American maternal grandparents, Paul and Miriam Peterson. They were born twentynine and thirty-one years after the famous queen, and had shared a great admiration for her, for her strength, her values, and the role model she represented for young, independent women. Queen Victoria was eighteen when she ascended the throne, and she ruled an empire for sixty-three years. Both Miriam and Paul felt that she was a shining example of womanhood at its best. She ruled wisely and well, had been a devoted wife, and had nine children, who eventually sat on nearly every throne in Europe. She was both a modern woman and a traditionalist, and combined these traits effectively. Widowed at forty-two, bereft over the early death of her beloved consort, Prince Albert, she ruled alone thereafter. She was the longest reigning sovereign of her day. Paul and Miriam Peterson named their only child Victoria after the British queen. Victoria Peterson, Alexandra’s American mother, was born in Illinois in 1875, when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, and had been for nearly forty years. Victoria Peterson’s dream for her daughter Alexandra was that she would be a strong, intelligent, independent woman one day, ready to take a stand for the causes she believed in, demonstrating her own ethics and the values she and her husband intended to instill in her. Alexandra matured exactly as her parents hoped she would. Victoria Peterson had been born and grew up in Beardstown, Illinois, a town of just over six thousand people, twohundred and thirty-two miles southwest of Chicago. Beardstown was an agricultural community, and Paul Peterson, her father, owned the local newspaper, The Beardstown Courier. He had lived in Beardstown all his life, and ventured out into the world to attend Princeton University, which opened his eyes and broadened his view of the world. He did a year of postgraduate studies at Oxford, took classes at the Sorbonne in Paris, returned to his hometown, and used the money his grandfather had left him to found the newspaper that became his passion. No matter how remote Beardstown was, or how distant from Chicago, he wanted to bring its citizens a deeper, more complex view of the world, and keep them fully informed of what was happening around the globe. The Beardstown Courier was his pride and joy. It covered local, national, and international politics, world events, anything of major interest happening in Chicago, important agricultural news and innovative developments, and whatever widened the perspective of the locals, some of whom had never been as far as Chicago, and rarely left their farms. Paul Peterson made it possible for them to be up-to-date on a variety of subjects, no matter how small and remote their town was. He had a global mentality.