Novel 197: Emily Eden, The Semi-Attached Couple (1860)
A newly married couple quarrels.
Here is the second of Eden’s two novels, its title apparently meant to recall its successful predecessor “The Semi-Detached House,” (see Novel 036) though its plot and characters are quite different. Though the second to appear, this was the first to be written (in 1829, according to Sutherland’s Victorian Fiction); it provides a convincing psychological portrait of its troubled heroine.
“A good-humoured social picture, playful in its satire, and very happy in its combinations of characters, sketched . . . with some fantastic exaggeration . . . but alway shrewd and always genial.” Examiner, September 8, 1860
“It has really done our heart good to read this light, slight, pleasant novel”; it is pervaded by a “spirit of kindness, charity, and good breeding.” Athenaeum, September 8, 1860
“Perhaps, the only tale that has been written in Miss Austen’s style of which Miss Austen need not have been ashamed.” Saturday Review, September 8, 1860
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