Charles Burton Barber, An Elegantly Dressed Horsewoman Jumping Over a Gate
In Scotland, a self-made millionaire’s daughter and niece fall in love with the same man.
Charles Gibbon (1843-1890) wrote some 30 novels beginning in 1864. This one features, in addition to some stock Victorian-novel figures (the ill-bred, wealthy industrialist, the self-sacrificing virtuous young lady, the young lover enraged by a misunderstanding) two carefully delineated and thoroughly interesting main characters.
Gibbon “has imagined the extraordinary fluctuations of” a main character’s “feelings . . . with remarkable felicity, and has drawn them with great skill. . . . It is an excellent and a very rare thing when the interest of a novel decidedly increases as it goes on.” Academy, September 9, 1875
The novel “should do much to give him a high place among delineators of character. . . . Besides containing several very masterly studies, it is full of humour, of quaint, wise, remark, and may be taken as a reliable picture of life in the district where the scene is laid.” Spectator, October 2, 1875
Download this week’s novel:
http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/f/89vilt/oxfaleph014735908
(Right-click (or control-click, if you have a Mac) on the “view digitized copy” links to download the novel’s three volumes in pdf form)