Critiques en avant-premièreMatthew Sweet

Orphan Ellinor Arden is called from her secluded Paris home to London for the hearing of a will.To her surprise, she is named as the inheritor of her estranged uncle’s fortune, on condition that she marry his adopted son. Encouraged by her lawyer and guardian, the dashing Horace Margrave, she enters into wedded life with this perfect stranger, but it soon becomes clear that her trust in a dead man’s wishes has been misplaced. Suspense-ridden sensation fiction from a master of the art, The Lawyer’s Secret and the counterpart piece presented here, ‘The Mystery at Fernwood’, represent gripping Victorian literature at its best.

Published under the pseudonym ‘Elia’, Charles Lamb’s series of essays on subjects ranging from the impressionability of schoolboys to the peculiarity of one’s relations, from the pitfalls of lending books to the delights of a roast meal, gained him a devoted following among nineteenth-century readers. By turns witty, insightful, self-deprecating and philosophical, in these essays Lamb offers an unusually warm, human glimpse of life in a circle that included such luminaries as Coleridge, Wordsworth and William Hazlitt.