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 341: Annie Edwardes, Archie Lovell (1866)

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

A carefree girl’s unconventionality places her in a moral dilemma.

For Edwardes, see Novels 158, 212, and 270.

“A very pretty story indeed, very well told, with incidents which are both plausible and natural”; for those who “like the true novel of comedy as it was before sensationalism triumphed.” Spectator, November 10, 1866

The heroine is “a bit of fresh and original painting.” Saturday Review, November 10, 1866

A somewhat contrasting view:

“A brisk, lively, and thoroughly readable tale, belonging to a low school of romantic art” marred by “false theory and Bohemian sentiment.” Athenaeum, November 17, 1866

Download this fortnight’s novel:

https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/44OXF_INST/35n82s/alma990147660440107026
(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)