Despite a sad childhood, a virtuous young lady brightens the world around her.
In a pleasant and unassuming style, Stirling (about whom nothing whatever is known except that she wrote two novels) presents us with a typical set of Victorian characters: the virtuous young heroine with whom everyone falls in love, the maneuvering mother, the handsome spendthrift. But she enlivens them, and some other less standard characters (a painfully shy clergyman, a socially phobic matron) with original touches, and, in a somewhat rambling plot, avoids entirely those two most tiresome of Victorian clichés—the lovers' misunderstanding, and the brain fever—while inventing interesting variations on such old standards as the arranged marriage and the jilted fiancée.
“Without introducing any startling incident, without depicting the workings of any deep passion, without any romance, mystery, or pretence to a plot, without even the aid of a single villain, the authoress of these volumes manages to throw round the loves and heart-burnings, the fears and hopes of Sedgely Court, a quiet continuous interest. . . . To make, in this way, the uneventful life of a country mansion not only bearable, but pleasant to the reader, and its inmates not passing acquaintances, but almost familiar friends, indicates that faculty in story-telling which, when ripened into artistic fulness, we often call genius.” Reader, March 25, 1865
“For a long time, we have read no tale that has so charmed us.” Dublin University Magazine, March, 1865
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v.1 https://archive.org/details/sedgelycourttale01stir