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 201: Eliza Lynn Linton, Lizzie Lorton of Greyrigg (1866)

George Paul Chalmers, Girl in a Boat
George Paul Chalmers, Girl in a Boat

In Cumberland, a lonely young lady, adored by a reforming clergyman, loves a swaggering mine supervisor.

For Linton, see Novels 044, 134.  Here she sets vivid characters at cross-purposes amid a carefully realized Cumberland setting.

“Mrs. Linton, thoroughly acquainted with the life of the Lake Country, paints an imaginary dale with its lake, its fells, its force and its Styebarrow, colours it in every detail with truth to nature, shuts it out from tourist life, and peoples its nooks and corners with characters of unsophisticated Cumberland life through which she weaves the action and passion of her story. . . .  As a true picture of forms of English life that are already vanishing, this novel . . . has an interest beyond the attraction of its tale of an unhappy girl’s life beating itself out in tragic passion.”  Examiner, May 12, 1866

Linton “has chosen a subject which she can handle well. . . .  The interest of her story is greatly enhanced by the fidelity with which the local colour is preserved.” Saturday Review, July 14, 1866

Linton “makes her really original plot natural with a thousand touches of explanation . . .. and has set her figures before a background which would make them seem natural were they far more bizarre.” This is “a novel . . .  indefinitely superior to the mass of those we are so often condemned to read.” Spectator, July 21, 1866

Download this week’s novel:

http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/f/89vilt/oxfaleph014559520
(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)