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 354: Margaret Hunt, This Indenture Witnesseth (1875)

Charles Sillem Lidderdale, The Letter
Charles Sillem Lidderdale, The Letter

A virtuous young heiress, all but engaged to a needy squire’s heir, loses her prospects.

For Hunt, see Novels 039 and 285.

Hunt “writes extremely well, and often forcibly.  She lays down her plan well beforehand, and carries it out without hurry and in good proportions”; “we are glad, on the whole, to commend this novel almost unreservedly.” Spectator, December 4, 1875

A somewhat contrasting view:

The plot is “managed with a great deal of ingenuity” but the characters are “well known to the hardened novel-reader.” Academy, November 13, 1875

Download this fortnight’s novel:

v.1 https://archive.org/details/thisindenturewit01hunt

v. 2 https://archive.org/details/thisindenturewit02hunt

v. 3 https://archive.org/details/thisindenturewit03hunt