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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill FINDING it unlikely that his uncle would ask for him before evening, and that consequently he had plenty of time at his disposal, Laurence embarked after breakfast upon a survey of the house. When a boy at school he had occasionally passed a couple of nights at Stoke Rivers. His recollections of these visits were not gay. He had been glad enough to go away again. It followed that his impressions of the house itself were vague and confused. He now found that it was constructed in the shape of a capital L reversed. The base of the letter, facing east and west, contained kitchens, offices, and servants' quarters. The main building ? at right angles to it ? was two stories in height, and consisted of suites of handsome rooms opening on to a wide corridor. The windows of the latter looked south, those of the rooms north. The colouring and furnishings resembled, in the main, those of Mr. Rivers' bedroom. Dark panelled walls, rich, sombre hangings of dark blue, crimson, or violetobtained throughout. In the drawing-rooms were some noble landscapes by Cuyp, Ruys- dael, and other Dutch masters of note. There was also an admirable collection of Italian ivories, small figures of exquisite workmanship; and several glass cases containing fine antique and renaissance gems. The walls of the libraries were lined with books ? a curious and varied collection, ranging from ancient black-letter volumes down to the latest German treatise, on natural science or metaphysics, of the current year. Laurence promised himself to make nearer acquaintance with these rather weighty joys at a more convenient season. Meanwhile, in contrast to the otherwise distinctly old-fashioned character of the house, he remarked a very complete installation of electric light, and an ingenious system of hot-air ventilat...… (plus d'informations)
This was very enjoyable to read, though the density of the late Victorian style was occasionally a little taxing. It combines the romantic and the supernatural in a charming story about a man who, at a safe distance from his American wife, in the English country house he is about to inherit from his eccentric dying uncle, falls in love with a ghost, and finds his memories bound up with those of a relative who died young at Trafalgar. The Gateless Barrier has been compared to Henry James's The Sense of the Past (which I have not read); certainly the Anglo-American contrast is a present theme, and they share an element of time-travel, or at least time-overlap. But as I neared the end of the book, as the hero wrestles with conflicting desires and duties, I was suddenly and powerfully reminded of the fantasy novels of George MacDonald, Lilith and Phantastes, with their romantically unwise heroes and their part-theological, part-psychological plots. The strong undercurrent of Christian moral and spiritual values is hardly surprising in a Victorian clergyman's wife and daughter ('Lucas Malet' being a pseudonym of Mary, daughter of the writer and clergyman Charles Kingsley and estranged wife of the vicar of Clovelly), but it does rather distance her from the Aesthetic Movement with which she is sometimes associated. It is a pity that this book is not better known. MB 4-ix-2007 ( )
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill FINDING it unlikely that his uncle would ask for him before evening, and that consequently he had plenty of time at his disposal, Laurence embarked after breakfast upon a survey of the house. When a boy at school he had occasionally passed a couple of nights at Stoke Rivers. His recollections of these visits were not gay. He had been glad enough to go away again. It followed that his impressions of the house itself were vague and confused. He now found that it was constructed in the shape of a capital L reversed. The base of the letter, facing east and west, contained kitchens, offices, and servants' quarters. The main building ? at right angles to it ? was two stories in height, and consisted of suites of handsome rooms opening on to a wide corridor. The windows of the latter looked south, those of the rooms north. The colouring and furnishings resembled, in the main, those of Mr. Rivers' bedroom. Dark panelled walls, rich, sombre hangings of dark blue, crimson, or violetobtained throughout. In the drawing-rooms were some noble landscapes by Cuyp, Ruys- dael, and other Dutch masters of note. There was also an admirable collection of Italian ivories, small figures of exquisite workmanship; and several glass cases containing fine antique and renaissance gems. The walls of the libraries were lined with books ? a curious and varied collection, ranging from ancient black-letter volumes down to the latest German treatise, on natural science or metaphysics, of the current year. Laurence promised himself to make nearer acquaintance with these rather weighty joys at a more convenient season. Meanwhile, in contrast to the otherwise distinctly old-fashioned character of the house, he remarked a very complete installation of electric light, and an ingenious system of hot-air ventilat...
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