The Alhambra
Irving travelled to Granada in 1829, moved into rooms in the Alhambra, and wrote a mixture of description, history and invented legend. The result is not a guidebook and not quite fiction: it is a set of sketches held together by the building itself.
The Moorish palace was in poor repair at the time, and Irving's book helped make it a tourist destination. Some of the tales are his own inventions, which he does not always admit. Read it for the atmosphere and for the early nineteenth-century idea of Spain, not for accurate history.
Public-domain status
First published in 1832. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Washington Irving died in 1859, so this work has been free to republish there since 1930.
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Keep reading
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- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
- Moby-Dick — Herman Melville, 1851
- Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847
- Granada — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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