Two unhappy young people meet by chance on Westminster bridge.
Best known for The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), expatriate American journalist Harold Frederic (1856-1898) wrote ten other novels before his death in middle age, one of them this brief, light-hearted love story set in London.
“We can thoroughly commend the book as an easily read piece of fancy.” Athenaeum, July 4, 1896
“Mr. Harold Frederic gives the reader of ‘March Hares’ a shock of delightful surprise. . . . he is captivating, amusing, a playful companion.” His characters “are simply human beings flung into the grotesque whirl of such a sequence of situations as only a riotous imagination could devise, but which such a keen intelligence as Mr. Frederic’s finds no difficulty making thoroughly natural. We use the word intelligence, because . . . Mr. Frederic seems to be exercising the mere gymnastical faculties of his mind, whipping along the dialogue with so much animation, so much fun, so much ingenuity, that the effect of the tale is not unlike that of the conversation of original and clever people. . . . It has art of the genuine sort, not mere silly craftsmanship and pretense, but the dignified art which means a quiet mastery of the subject in hand. There are few novelists to-day who could have taken such a gossamer theme as that of ‘March Hares’ and left it so well worked out as it has been in the present case.” New York Tribune, December 20, 1896
Download this week’s novel: