AustLit

Romantic tragedy. A young Englishman establishes a house for his youthful bride only to discover that she has been seduced on the ship out and has fled with her lover. The husband watches over her and when she is cast off provides her with the home he has prepared but he leaves. She dies of sorrow, and, several years after, having returned to England to prevent the marriage of her seducer, he dies too. Well told. (PB)

Australian tale of bushfire and romance. Christmas Day 1884 sees the narrator gallop across the dry tinder bushland to the home of his beloved Gretchen and her German father. A vengeful swagman, refusing to take his lunch and go peaceably, ignites a bushfire that destroys the homestead and nearly catches the escaping couple. Only one horse remaining at the homestead, the father had shot himself to persuade his daughter to go ... Well-told; still with an eye to the English reader. (PB)

Family saga, set in Toorak, Melbourne in the late 1880s after the Crash. Lorna is wooed by rich, middle-aged, unpleasant George Langly - favoured by her mother for his money - and handsome Colin Rooke, friend of her brother Lynn returning from colonial experience in Queensland. Pressure exerted by Langly through his mortgage over their family home is frustrated when Colin's sister identifies him as the husband who deserted her in America - her claims supported by the opera singer he abandoned after marrying her bigamously. Colin's recall of £50,000 in Broken Hill mining shares are the icing on the cake ... Pleasant tale of wealthy lives in post-Boom Melbourne. Full descriptions of balls and gardens. (PB)

Brook visits the selection he left fifteen years before. While there he amuses himself by courting the tenant's plain and unworldly niece, but leaves her behind when he returns to the city.