In Cumberland, a lonely young lady, adored by a reforming clergyman, loves a swaggering mine supervisor.
For Linton, see Novels 044, 134. Here she sets vivid characters at cross-purposes amid a carefully realized Cumberland setting.
“Mrs. Linton, thoroughly acquainted with the life of the Lake Country, paints an imaginary dale with its lake, its fells, its force and its Styebarrow, colours it in every detail with truth to nature, shuts it out from tourist life, and peoples its nooks and corners with characters of unsophisticated Cumberland life through which she weaves the action and passion of her story. . . . As a true picture of forms of English life that are already vanishing, this novel . . . has an interest beyond the attraction of its tale of an unhappy girl’s life beating itself out in tragic passion.” Examiner, May 12, 1866
Linton “has chosen a subject which she can handle well. . . . The interest of her story is greatly enhanced by the fidelity with which the local colour is preserved.” Saturday Review, July 14, 1866
Linton “makes her really original plot natural with a thousand touches of explanation . . .. and has set her figures before a background which would make them seem natural were they far more bizarre.” This is “a novel . . . indefinitely superior to the mass of those we are so often condemned to read.” Spectator, July 21, 1866
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