James Clarke Hook, Wreckage from the Fruiter
A virtuous young lady is courted by both an honest young coast-guard captain and a middle-aged landowner with a past.
Catherine Anne Hubback (1820?-1880?) was Jane Austen’s niece (the daughter of her brother Sir Francis—possibly more a drawback than an advantage in her career, since it led critics into invidious comparisons). She wrote ten novels between 1850 and 1862. This one begins well, though it eventually comes to grief amid melodramatic crimes implausibly concealed and even more implausibly revealed. The second volume, where well-delineated characters are shown at amusing cross purposes, is the best.
“It is well written, carefully worked out, and very interesting; the morality is healthy, and, though highly wrought, is neither fantastic nor overstrained. . . . The incidents of the discovery are too much forced, and the repetition of disasters at sea shows a want of invention . . . surprising in so clever a writer.” Athenaeum, May 23, 1857
It is, “though not free from defects . . . the best of all Mrs. Hubback’s works, and one which proves her to be nearly allied by genius, as she is by blood, to the first of English female novelists”; she “shows considerable ingenuity in the construction of the plot, and no small power of telling a story. Then some of the characters are very powerfully sketched, and presented in a manner which displays great knowledge of human nature.” Saturday Review, August 8, 1857
Download this week’s novel:
v.1 https://books.google.com/books?id=z5k9AQAAMAAJ&pg=PP5#v=onepage&q&f=false
v.2 https://books.google.com/books?id=8pk9AQAAMAAJ&pg=PP5#v=onepage&q&f=false
v.3 https://books.google.com/books?id=DZo9AQAAMAAJ&pg=PP5#v=onepage&q&f=false