A bad man manipulates a weak, fearful woman.
Here is another novel by Fullerton (see Novel 019), again featuring a woman helplessly enmeshed in impossible dilemmas.
“It is . . . finely natural, discriminating in tracing the movements of the human heart, affording admirable contrasts, and being touchingly pathetic. . . . The . . . author . . . passionately unfolds the wretchedness of a soul in mortal agony through doubt, uncertainty, crushing oppression, and irresistible despair. It is, indeed, a tale of woe, with little or no relief; and all who do not shun the luxury of tears over the pictures of fiction will hasten to their delineation here by a pencil of the deepest interest and potent effect. The finale is most affecting; and what precedes and makes it inevitable is yet more forcible.” Literary Gazette, May 11, 1844
Fullerton “has shown a depth of observation surprising in so young a writer; the power of sustaining a strong and simple interest; a taste for homely portraiture; and a wholesome contempt of the trival follies of what are called fashionable subjects.” Examiner, June 1, 1844
A contrasting view:
“This novel is the work of a clever and accomplished writer, possessed of considerable skill in the conduct of a story and the management of dialogue; and as such it cannot be read without some gratification. Its grand defect is the almost unmitigated monotony of wretchedness pervading the tale of misery. Its wearisome painfulness is not lessened by the purely constructive woes of its heroine; neither do the artful ingenuity and verisimilitude of the details hide the improbability of the main circumstances or the inconsistency of conduct in the principal persons. . . . The vein of religious sentiment running through the work is out of place in a fiction not involving matters of creed and opinion. . . . The pathos is of a morbid larmoyante kind—disagreeable without being exciting.” Spectator, May 18, 1844
Download this week’s novel:
v.1 https://archive.org/details/ellenmiddletonta01full