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 268: Noell Radecliffe, Sybilla Lockwood (1864)

Edmund Blair Leighton, Courtship
Edmund Blair Leighton, Courtship

An heiress, married for her money by one bad man, is tempted by another.

For Radecliffe, see Novels 005, 105, and 157.

“The people in Sybilla Lockwood are more like . . . ‘humans’ than people in stories usually are.” Saturday Review, July 30, 1864

“The novel is a very extraordinary one.  The subject is . . . adultery. . . . We cannot think ‘Sybilla Lockwood’ at all fitted for general reading. . . .Otherwise the execution, though not brilliant, is singularly faultless.  The motives and the conduct of the different characters bear a rational relation to each other.”  Spectator, August 13, 1864

A contrasting view:

“There is not in ‘Sybilla Lockwood’ sufficient weight of interest to carry the reader through the private affairs of the numerous characters. . . .  The novel is badly constructed, being merely a bundle of personal histories, with no plot or story to bind them together.” Athenaeum, September 10, 1864

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