A young artist spends time painting in the New Forest, managing her house in Chelsea, and staying with her farmer grandfather in Norfolk.
The Hon. Emily Lawless (1845-1913), daughter of an Irish baron, wrote some nine novels between 1892 and 1898.
“Cleverly written, with a good deal of natural aptitude and scarcely any sign of effort. Both the subject and its treatment are fresh, and the story moves on smoothly and lightly.” Athenaeum, October 28, 1882
“The story . . . is essentially a pleasant one”; the title character’s “griefs are just sufficiently deep and prolonged to furnish that vital necessity for truth in the portraiture of human life, which all but the absolutely ignorant or the hopelessly silly must demand as a condition of their accepting the likeness at all; her virtues are attractive, but not overpowering, and her vexations are so amusing that one is sorry to part with them”; “The author has succeeded perfectly in making her heroine real to the reader”; “a very bright and pleasing novel.” Spectator, November 4, 1882
A contrasting view (from a critic who appears not to have read the novel, well over half of which is not set in London):
“A London novel, interminable as London streets and as generally dreary.” New York Times, May 27, 1883
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