AustLit

Humorous account of the cost of gaining knowledge of life. (PB)

On the unreasonableness of human nature which expects different behaviour from its neighbour than it exhibits. (PB)

American narrator recounts a story of caste, romance and insanity set in England. A lower middle class English painter, a genius and man of deep emotional expression, wins the promise of aristocratic Kate Naxon to marry him. He falls ill and while he is convalescing in Madeira she announces her engagement to her cousin, an army officer. The artist returns to England insane. Her new husband is posted overseas to war. Some months later she returns with her ailing baby to the spot where the artist proposed, and he too returns there in his madness. The night conversing together ages her by years but quiets his madness to a relative calm. Her husband dies and she takes the still insane artist to share her home. Very interesting observations on the English caste system, love and emotion, and the effects of passion on the soul ... (PB)

Advice of a sensible aunt on fresh air, excercise and diet changes an unhealthy woman to an attractive spirited healthy wife. Effect on marriage stressed. (PB)

Ghost tale recounted to a small gathering of male friends in London in 1874 by an officer later killed in the Zulu wars; of his adoption by an uncle living in Cornwall, the loss of his will, and the appearance of his ghost to his nephew to show him its location. Tone of male camaraderie and club talk pervades this otherwise straightforward ghost tale. (PB)

Domestic tiff is revealed to be a misunderstanding - and the intervention of a meddlesome old maid speeds up the reconciliation. The cause of a wifely sigh is revealed to be which buttons to put on a dressing-gown intended for her husband's birthday. (PB)

The married man is her father. Peculiar humour. (PB)

A suitor's romantic pleas are scotched by common-sense - until he reveals his bank balance and his intentions. (PB)

The daughter of a petty officer killed in the German Imperial Service is given a pension for herself and her mother through a chance meeting with the German king. (PB)

Mystery surrounding a gentleman's voluntary amputation of his hand in Paris is discovered to be linked to a false identity assumed in London. The narrator, a medical student in Paris, recounts his Italian fellow student's amputation of the hand which he refused to remove. Later, a chance encounter with a suicidal young woman near Hampstead Heath where his practice was, a glimpse of her with the amuptee, and a recognition of him in the role of a rich English colonel, survivor of the Chili-Peruvian war and fiancee of an aristocratic woman, reveal a villainous imposture ... (PB)

A servant's mistake directs her master's complaints to a wrong neighbour. A doctor, he eventually meets the pretty woman, also a doctor, and discovers that it was her and not the old maid across the road who was receiving his angry notes. (PB)

Tale of a faithful and loving Frenchwoman who takes a position in Paris as a governess to earn enough to allow herself and her fiancee - disabled in the war - to set themselves up in business. The brother of her pupil is angered when she refuses to marry him and has her tried as a thief and hung. She recovers from the hanging to marry her soldier. Undercurrent of Napoleonic order replacing Revolutionary chaos. (PB)

Romance and murder. Valentes finds her uncle opposed to her marriage with Arthur Grayling, brother of the forger he had had convicted of forgery and sent to Australia. They elope but it is on the same morning as her uncle's murdered body is discovered. Suspicions point to Frances until the arrest of two burglars brings a confession from Arthur's brother. (PB)

Romance between an aristocratic Englishman returned from the dead in disguise to claim his inheritance from his extravagant family (armed with the mortgages on the estate) and the daughter of the local inkeeper. The young woman had loved the heir's younger brother 5 years before but he has spurned her when his mother had refused to accept her and now sought to marry an heiress. Challenges English class distinctions with values learnt in America, though not very realistically. (PB)

A mother working for poor wages revenges herself on her exacting mistress for the evidence she gave convicting the poor woman's son and having him sentenced to 3 years imprisonment. Not only does she keep her imprisoned in the cellar for three years but in her slight derangement of mind cunningly makes her disappearance look like suicide. Her son is released on a neighbour's evidence and it happens he and his mother are the true heirs to the farm she works on ... (PB)