David Alfred Bywaters's Crossword Cavalcade & Fortnightly Victorian Novel Recommender. Every Saturday! Either a new language-torturing puzzle or an old novel by an unjustly neglected Victorian author. Why waste time on other amusements?

Novel 060: Anne Beale, Gladys the Reaper (1860)

Myles Birket Foster, The Milk-maid
Myles Birket Foster, The Milk-maid

An Irish orphan seeks her Welsh relations.

Anne Beale (1816-1900) wrote some twenty novels between 1844 and 1891.  This one, set in her native Wales, has vivid characters and an endearingly contrived plot (though the treacle does run a little thick in the last volume).

A “half-pastoral Welsh story”; the plot “may be said perhaps rather to have been well felt than cunningly devised.  It is unquestionably interesting, but a quiet sense of what is good and beautiful in life is the chief grace of the tale.”  Examiner, October 27, 1860

“An interesting, natural story, written with evident care and pains.” Athenaeum, November 10, 1860

Download this week’s novel:

v.1 https://archive.org/details/gladysreaperbya03bealgoog

v.2 https://archive.org/details/gladysreaperbya02bealgoog

v.3 https://archive.org/details/gladysreaperbya00bealgoog