Guide
What is a modernized edition?
It’s the whole book, in the English we speak today. Every scene, every image and every paragraph is still there; only the old-fashioned language is brought up to date. It isn’t a summary or a retelling: you still read the book itself.
What changes
- Old spellings and punctuation are brought up to date.
- Words and forms that have fallen out of use (“thee”, “hath”, “wherefore”) become the words we'd use today.
- Very long sentences are split where that makes them easier to follow.
What stays
- The whole story, in the same order: nothing is summarised or cut.
- Every paragraph: each one in the original has exactly one in the modernized edition.
- The author's voice, their images and their jokes.
See the difference
Real paragraphs from books in our library. Switch between the versions; the words that change are marked.
I was anxious on discovering this paper, to reopen the correspondence commenced by Doctor Hesselius, so many years before, with a person so clever and careful as his informant seems to have been. Much to my regret, however, I found that she had died in the interval.
Reading one on Obscura
You don’t have to choose one version for the whole book. Switch between the original and the modernized text on any page and you stay in the same place, because the two match paragraph by paragraph. Your highlights carry across too.
Many readers start in the modernized text and switch to the original for the passages they love, or read the original and switch when a sentence gets tangled. Footnotes explain references a modern reader might miss, and you can tap an old-fashioned word to look it up without leaving the page.
Our editors prepare each modernized edition and match it, paragraph by paragraph, to the original. Every book in the library has its original text; modernized editions are being added month by month.
Try it yourself
Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is free for everyone, no account needed.