A virtuous wife deals with the appalling misbehavior of her arrogant husband.
Noell Radecliffe published eight novels between 1854 and 1870. Nothing else is known about her (him?), and yet her (his?) works have great emotional power and psychological subtlety. In The Secret History of a Household, she (he?) evokes a nightmarish world where well-meaning innocence is inevitably encompassed and defeated by selfishness and cruelty.
“Every lover of the beautiful and the true in woman will sympathise with the wife.” Morning Post, February 15, 1855
“With much talent, and the power to interest and carry along the reader, it is as bad and pernicious a book as we ever read. . . . There is a total want of all faculty to discriminate between right and wrong.” Athenaeum, March 17, 1855
“This work evinces no diminution of [Radecliffe’s] power of delineation and . . . faculty of invention. . . . Of the general portraiture we must say that it is strong—rather strong than flattering; and of the general tone of the pictures of genteel life, that it is dark—more dark than pleasing.” Morning Chronicle, April 4, 1855
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