By beach and bog-land

This is the lite story of an eager, earnest young soul, rising at length above the illusion of the senses to the clear heights of faith. Noble aims, misconstrued in the mirage of modern Paris, under the charm of a deluding spirituality, bring us to the moment of choice between two paths, one that of so-called Free Love, the other that of supreme self-sacrifice. The dreamy mysticism, the sparkling humour, the sudden brilliances, the delicate fancies which characterise the work of the author of ‘The New Antigone’ are to be found in this newest and perhaps most fascinating of Dr. Barry’s books. A background of adventure is set by the last days of the Second Empire and the Commune of 1871.

A dramatic episode of life in Homburg, at the height of the English season. The characters represent types of men and women actually to be met with in the high social and political world of to-day. A Society Beauty and a Sister of an Anglican Community personify the red Rose of Love, Pride and Gaiety, and the pale Lily of Purity, Aspiration and Repression. In the heart of the Rose, a lily bud unfolds, and in the calyx of the Lily, a rose blossoms. The incidents of the story succeed each other swiftly, reaching a strong dénoûement, and working out to a satisfying termination.

Lady Patricia is an Englishwoman of a noble but impoverished family, whose girlhood has been spent on the Continent. Left an orphan she comes to England with the independent intention of seeking her own living. Sometimes under her own, sometimes under an assumed name, she takes various situations in England and France, and is brought in contact with many different sets of society both in the upper and the middle classes. In this volume she relates her experiences, and comments upon them with caustic wit. The plan of the work affords the author of ‘The Letters of Her Mother to Elizabeth’ an excellent opportunity of satirising the aristocracy and the bourgeois gentilshommes of England and France, and readers of the earlier volume will be prepared for a book full of piquancy and daring.

There is nothing easier for a girl who has been born in a garrison town of hard-up Service parents than to drift, especially if, as in the case of Philippa, she has been disappointed in her first romance and is left a little soured and hardened. It is so easy to enjoy the tawdry amusements that come her way; and if, like Philippa, she is beautiful, flirtation follows flirtation, men come and go, till it becomes the habit to talk of her as ‘that fast Miss Blount.’ She is not the sort of girl as a rule who gets married. There is something in the atmosphere about her which makes marrying men fight shy of her. Philippa, however, is saved from social shipwreck by marrying in such a way as to rouse the envy of all those who have been her traducers. The background of the story is concerned with the family life of Captain and Mrs Blount’s household. There are also some exciting chapters dealing with the South African war.

The main theme of this story is the fundamental antagonism existing between two characters—an American girl educated in ideas of freedom and independence, and of the subservience of man to woman, and her husband, an English Lord, who expects his wife to regard his career and interests as her own, and to devote herself to them even to the obliteration of herself. The girl’s father is a millionaire, and the story tells incidentally of the illicit means by which his pile was made.

The scene is laid in Halliwell Sutcliffe’s favourite country, the moors of the West Riding, though in the present book he goes even further into the heart of the heath, nearer to that simplicity of feeling and passion which is the real mark of the moor-folk. His characters spring from the moor, as it were, and grow out of it; and not least of these characters is Hester, the impulsive, erring farm lass, who dreamed wild dreams at Windy Farm, and saw herself supplanted by a little, well-born woman rescued from the snow.

This story—the last that was written by Mrs Alexander—tells the experiences of a well-born, beautiful Irish girl suddenly plunged, somewhere about the ‘forties,’ into commercial circles in a busy English port. The attraction of the book consists rather in the brightly-drawn contrast of the Irish and English temperaments, with their widely differing views of life, than in exciting incidents, though the reader can hardly fail to feel the fascination of the heroine or to be interested in all that befalls her.

The author considers this the most important book she has yet written. Its preparation has engaged her for a long time, and in it she gives her readers the very best of herself. The scene is laid in Rome in the first century A.D., and among the characters are many historical figures. The period offers magnificent opportunities for the writer of romance, and of Mrs Campbell Praed’s imaginative gifts and power of vivid description it is, of course, needless to speak at this time of day. The story, which is a lengthy one, will be found to be full of dramatic situations and thrilling incidents.

A romance dated in the closing years of the sixteenth century, and placed on both sides of the border. The time, a stirring one, when the old order changing had not yet wholly yielded place to the new, admits of romantic incidents of every kind, from raiding, kidnapping and gaol-breaking, to mysterious love-making and midnight murder. The intrigues between the English and Scottish Courts form a plot sufficiently intricate, which is here likened to a game of whist, the court-cards chiefly used therein being Queen Elizabeth of England, James VI of Scotland, and the celebrated Archie Armstrong, called ‘The Knave of Hearts,’ who by a series of extraordinary adventures, rose from the condition of a wanderer and sheep stealer on the border side to the position of chief jester and ruling favourite at the Scottish Court.

This is the history of the earlier half of the life of a man of genius, following him through boyhood and youth to maturity. It is a book in which the form, the atmosphere, count for much. Essentially the study of a temperament—a temperament subtle, delicate, rare—it has more in common, perhaps, with the work of D’Annunzio than that of any English novelist; the author’s aim, at all events, having been to describe, from within, the gradual development of a human soul—to trace the wanderings of a spirit as it passes from light to light in search of that great light ‘that never was on sea or land.’

In this book Mr Sutcliffe abandons his strenuous manner of adventure, feud, swordplay and fierce wooing, and gives us an English idyll. The bachelor is a man of some thirty odd years, who dwells in rural peace among his animals, birds, fields and flowers, and, assisted by his faithful henchman, sows his seeds, mows and prunes in complacent contempt for such as have succumbed to the delights of matrimony. And so he fares through spring and summer, seedtime and harvest, his chief companions the squire across the fields and his young daughter, till as time goes on he discovers that the girl is all the world to him, and the curtain descends on the bachelor—a bachelor no more.

This story deals with the adventures of a man and a maid in the time of Mary I of England. The heroine, the daughter of a wild and reckless father, inherits his bold spirit, and by her woman’s wit and courage, assists her lover to elude the pursuit of his enemies. She sallies forth in man’s attire for his sake, and has many adventures, both humorous and otherwise, before the end is attained.

This story, which is largely based on fact, describes the career of a young Irish girl whose father was transported to Botany Bay for being concerned in the publication of a ‘seditious’ newspaper. Helen Adair, so that she may follow her father to the Antipodes, and share, or at least alleviate, his misfortunes under the dreaded ‘Convict System,’ passes counterfeit coin in Dublin, is tried and convicted under an assumed name, and is sent out in a transport. Her adventures in Australia form an exciting romance.

This is the story of a gifted, sensitive woman, her husband who was a genius, and the unquenchable love for each other which was their torture and their bane.

The ‘Innocent Impostor’ of the title is a very charming girl who has grown up in the full belief of herself and the world that she is Miss Barclay of Eaglesfaulds; her mother dotes on her, she is seemingly heiress to large property, even the Queen is interested in her, how can she guess that she is in reality the daughter of a beggar woman, and is keeping the rightful heir out of his inheritance? How this extraordinary situation came about and the trouble and tangle it brought into the life of a sensitive and noble-natured girl, is narrated by E. H. Strain after the fashion which has already endeared her to many readers.

Critics who have read this novel in manuscript speak of it as the best story Mrs Barr has yet written. Its central character—Cotton Mather, preacher, scholar, philanthropist and persecutor—is one of the most picturesque figures in American history, while the period—that of the witchcraft scare at the opening of the eighteenth century, when numbers of men and women suffered cruel persecution for their supposed trafficking with the Evil One—is full of dramatic possibilities.

In this novel Mrs Craigie turns from the glittering world of finance, which she depicted so brilliantly in ‘Love and the Soul Hunters,’ and gives us a story of life in an English provincial town. As in all her books the love interest is strong, and under the ‘signoria d’Amore’ her characters are led into situations of the deepest interest, demanding for their treatment all the subtlety of insight which her previous works have shown her to possess.

This is the story of three young men, living together in London lodgings, of the ideals of womanhood which they have formed, and of the singular fashion in which each falls a victim to the charms of a woman in all respects the opposite to his ideal. The story takes the reader from London to the most romantic region of the Channel Islands, and is connected with a mystery which surrounds the owner of one of these islands.