Novel 032: Cecilia Frances Tilley, Chollerton: A Tale of Our Own Times (1846)
An orphaned young lady of firm Tractarian principles, having gone to live with some distant cousins, is wooed by a baronet and admired by a clergyman
Cecilia Frances Tilley (1816–1849), Frances Trollope’s daughter, Anthony and T.A. Trollope’s sister, Henry Milton’s niece, wrote only one novel before dying of consumption in her early thirties. Though marred somewhat by religious lecturing, Chollerton exhibits the family facility with character, plot, and style.
A “specimen of the lesser novel”: the “story sufficiently probable; the characters natural . . . the style easy, and rather elegant.” Spectator, August 15, 1846
Though of the objectionable class of “controversial fictions,” this is “beyond measure the best”: “the plot is well constructed, the incidents flow naturally one from another, the characters are conceived vividly and sustained with skill.” And it is less “tainted with illiberality than any similar work we have seen.” Critic, October 24, 1846
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