Novel 264: Anthony Hope, The Indiscretion of the Duchess (1894)
An English gentleman stays at the home of a French duchess in the duke’s absence; unexpected consequences, involving a beautiful singer and a valuable necklace, ensue.
Here is another breezy but involving novel by Hope (see Novel 124).
“It is dramatic and thrilling, and keeps the reader aroused from cover to cover. It is also charmingly written. . . . No one can help becoming engrossed in the book. But it is not a story with a purpose.” Congregationalist, November 22, 1894
“The interest is, by turns, pleasantly sentimental or strongly exciting. There are strange happenings in every chapter. . . . The element of dramatic suspense is skillfully contrived and well sustained. The story is wildly ‘improbable,’ but it is purposely so. The improbable has a wholesome tonic effect when the literary malady called ‘realism’ is epidemic.” New York Times, November 24, 1894
A (somewhat) contrasting view:
If Hope “does not excite us much, or stir our deeper emotions, he at least succeeds in keeping us amused and awake. It would be absurd to talk about literature in connexion with such a book . . . and it would be uncharitable to deny that it is of more than average merit regarded as a means of intellectual entertainment of quite as high a kind as collecting crests or taming white mice. We must have something to read after dinner, and we might just as well turn the leaves of The Indiscretion of the Duchess as struggle with the evening paper.” Saturday Review, December 1, 1894
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