Book Review by Kathryn R: I found this book in the Old Pier Bookshop* in Morecambe while browsing for other books from 1900-1950. It was in the ‘collectables’ case. There is no publication date in this edition, but the cover and the preface suggest that it was published in the early 1960s, as the writer … Continue reading
Tagged with melodramatic fiction …
Hatter’s Castle (1931) by A J Cronin
Book Review by Sylvia D: I decided to read Hatter’s Castle for the Scottish and Welsh session, because, apart from the treatment of its women characters, Cronin’s The Citadel was a good read with a strong message. Hatter’s Castle was his first novel and couldn’t be more different from The Citadel. It is 600 pages … Continue reading
The Man in Grey – a Regency Romance (1941), by Eleanor Smith
It’s tosh and I loved it. Bath gentility, Almack’s assemblies, gauzy frocks, curricles and phaetons, two aristocrats in a marriage of convenience, her lover and his mistress. I can’t help feeling that Georgette Heyer would have arranged matters very differently. The cynical, bored Marquis of Rohan, the Man in Grey, would have met not the … Continue reading
She Was His Wife (1936) by Augusta Varty-Smith
Book Review by Sylvia D: My second book from the Mark Valentine donation is Augusta Varty-Smith’s She Was His Wife, published by Heath Cranton in 1936. Peter Carmichael is a successful, third generation City businessman whose father had built up an extensive estate, Long Ashes, a train ride away from the City, and had provided … Continue reading
Police at the Funeral (1931) by Margery Allingham
Book review by Sylvia D. My Queen of Crime novel was Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham (pub 1931 by Heinemann. My edition is a Penguin Classic Crime 1987, one of many reprints). It’s the fourth of the Campion series and was made into a two part TV production in 1989. Picture a large … Continue reading
Dunkerley’s by Howard Spring (1946)
Review by Sylvia D: I remember Howard Spring being a very popular writer when I was in my teens but as I was going through my “highbrow” period at the time, I chose not to read him! When I started reading Dunkerley’s I thought at first I was going to be surprised but my initial … Continue reading
Paths of Judgment by Anne Douglas Sedgwick (1904)
Hurrah! Another review of an Anne Douglas Sedgwick novel! Her novels stimulated a heated debate at our reading group; some felt she was simply sub-standard Henry James or Edith Wharton and not worth reading – others firmly disagreed. I suspect that the book I read, Tante, was the best of the bunch. Review by Thecla … Continue reading
Tante by Anne Douglas Sedgwick (1911)
Reading this book made me reflect, again, on how reading a novel is a very different experience when you have been exposed to marketing, and when you haven’t. If I had read this book with a dust jacket the blurb would most likely have told me that this was a story of dangerous woman – … Continue reading
East Lynne by Mrs Henry Wood (1861)
Review by Sylvia D: East Lynne is a little outside the scope of the Readership and Literary Cultures remit as it was first published in 1861 having previously been serialised in the New Monthly Magazine. However, it is without a doubt a highly engaging melodramatic novel which, although panned by some contemporary critics, was spectacularly … Continue reading
Concert Pitch by Frank Danby (1913)
This review is for a novel by a member of the forgotten family of writers we looked at last month, the Frankaus. Frank Danby is the pseudonym for Julia Frankau, the mother of Gilbert Frankau. She was a popular novelist in the early twentieth century – see a review of another of her books, Mothers … Continue reading
Reading 1900-1950 