Novel 134: Eliza Lynn Linton, My Love! (1881)

 
Henry Nelson O’Neil, Painting con Amore

Henry Nelson O’Neil, Painting con Amore

 

A vain amateur artist-poet and an ill-tempered old lady oppress their young adult children.


Here is another novel by Linton (see Novel 044), with some especially entertaining minor characters, such as the thoroughly modern girl twins Gip and Pip.

“In ‘My Love!’ Mrs. Lynn Linton has devoted herself with much success to the portraiture of some of the baser passions, such as selfishness, meanness, hypocrisy, and ill temper.”  She “is brilliantly clever from first to last, and . . . there is not a dull page in her novel, though there are many that are disagreeable.  She writes brightly, vigorously, and eloquently; she is uncommonly painstaking and earnest; her dialogue is always apt and pointed; and many of her personages . . . are of singular merit and interest.  ‘My Love!’ in fact, is an unusually able and impressive book, its unattractive purpose notwithstanding.” Athenaeum, July 9, 1881

My Love is a readable and amusing love story. . . .  It is a tale of love, pure and simple, although the three or more love affairs which run parallel to each other are illustrated or encumbered by a multiplicity of episodes; while a great variety of characters, vigorously sketched, are brought together into active and energetic collaboration.  Mrs. Lynn Linton generally inclines to the grave; but in this novel she is often humorous, and sometimes sprightly, or even comic. . . . Altogether Mrs. Lynn Linton has written an agreeable story; and it is agreeable chiefly because . . . she has always taken some pains to show the more amiable side of her least amiable characters.” Saturday Review, August 13, 1881

Download this week’s novel:

v.1 https://archive.org/details/mylove__01lint/

v.2 https://archive.org/details/mylove__02lint/

v.3 https://archive.org/details/mylove__03lint/