This author's books tend to be a bit religious, and this is no exception. On the mother's death the Redfern family moved to Canada, where there was a strong Scottish tradition, with preacher and kirk much as they had been in Scotland, and with many of the services in Gaelic, the language which many of these Scottish emigrants had spoken since their birth. The family settle on a small farm, bringing up the children, including Christie, in a good Christian manner.

As with other of Mrs. Robertson's books much of the action takes place in the young girls' minds, and we do not have a lot to do with the four boys of the family. There are neighbouring families, including the Nesbitt's, in a similar status.

The actual copy of the book used was in very good condition, and we scanned it in at a high resolution, but we discovered that some of the type-setting and the original proof-reading had not been too good for some of the punctuation marks were missing. I am referring to full stops at the ends of paragraphs, and that sort of thing. We have done our utmost to set this matter right, as well as dealing with places where the type had become damaged.

The book makes a nice peaceful slow-moving audiobook.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

Margaret Murray Robertson was born in Scotland, and came to Quebec via the United States. Here she began her writing career. Her best known work was "Christie Redfern's Troubles", but all had much the same theme as "Shenac's Work at Home", the story of a selfless girl. The setting is Glengarry County, Ontario, and the background is Scottish. Shenac is the Gaelic form of Jane.

Signed OCCL, and taken from a web page "Canadian Children's Books, 1852-1868."

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century, and sometimes earlier than that. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read either here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk