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A Scottish spinster supervises the lives and loves of two virtuous young ladies.

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For Oliphant, see novels 007, 008, 056, 107, and 152.  This was the first of her hundred-some novels, published when she was 21 years old, but featuring a fully convincing time-worn middle-aged narrator.

“There is not much of story in this . . . but there is so much nature, truthfulness, and quiet strength in the manner of telling it, that the narrative possesses much interest, especially for readers whose taste has not been vitiated by the exciting doses of the intense school.” Spectator, December 22, 1849

“Dispositions and motives of conduct are shown as clearly as if every person in the story had a window placed opposite the heart to reveal its most secret throes.  We come to know them all slowly, but with a perfect knowledge, as we advance through their long conversations, and the daily routine of their affairs.”  Fraser’s, November, 1850

Download this week’s novel:

http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/f/89vilt/oxfaleph014609775
(Right-click (or control-click, if you have a Mac) on the “view digitized copy” links to download the novel’s three volumes in pdf form.  NB: they are out of order)

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This week’s puzzle has a theme no one has ever tried before—at least so far as I know—in which added letters, and parsing, and synonyms, and puns, are all daringly combined in no fewer than six original nonsense phrases!  I’m a little worried that releasing it into the universe will result in the creation of a semantic black hole from which meaning can never escape, and that then nothing will ever make sense again.  But I’m going to chance it!

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Download this week’s crossword:

204-Afterthoughts.puz

204-Afterthoughts.pdf

Solve this week’s crossword online:

204 Afterthoughts

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A virtuous but self-willed young lady with a discreditable family attracts the love of both a faithful farmer and a haughty aristocrat.

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Here is a another novel by Mann, for whom see Novels 016 and 154. A priggish clergyman character is especially well done.

“In very few recent novels will there be found anything approaching its grasp of character and firmness of touch.  The writer looks at life with a very straight eye.  She certainly does not err on the side of idealizing character, and is not at all averse to laughing at those with whom she is on friendly terms. . . .  Her characters are not made of ink and paper, but of flesh and blood, and her book has no flimsiness in either its thought or its workmanship.”  Bookman, February 1893

For the author it “has clearly been recreation as well as work, and it happens not unnaturally that the reader as well as the writer is recreated. . . .  It has impulse, movement, sprightliness, life.”  Academy, March 4, 1893

Download this week’s novel:

v.1 http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_00000004DED4#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=6&xywh=513%2C666%2C3426%2C2083

v.2 http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_00000004DEDA#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=6&xywh=-325%2C-1%2C3227%2C1963

v.3 http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_00000004DEE0#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=6&xywh=-362%2C-1%2C3162%2C1923

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22 Across is not the first joke I’ve made about knights in armor.  There’s something irresistibly comic, at least to me, about grown men dressing in metal suits and hacking away at each other—though of course it can’t have been funny at the time. There’s a display of armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which at least one of the helmets is screwed tight—at nose level—by what is clearly a wing-nut.   I can’t look at it without smiling, and  wondering when and how wing-nut technology was developed.

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Download this week’s crossword:

203-To-My-Chagrin.puz

203-To-My-Chagrin.pdf

Solve this week’s crossword online:

203 To My Chagrin

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In a New England town, a society leader takes up a poor but talented widow.

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Harriet Waters Preston (1836-1911) wrote five novels between 1871 and 1888, but she was better known as a translator.  The title here is a self-denigrating reference to the novel’s somewhat cursory plot; Preston’s interest is focused instead on the New England setting and on the protagonist, a married, middle-aged woman.

“A pleasant little story, with a rather ostentatious absence of completeness or definiteness in its plot.” Academy, February 3, 1877

“To be really entertaining in one volume is a great merit, and more especially is it a merit when an author is not only entertaining in small compass, but able to present us with a picture of manners and of a life which we but half know, and wish to know more thoroughly. . . .  The interest of the tale lies partly in its intrinsic vivacity, and partly in the bright glimpse it gives us of the higher social culture of the Northern States of the American Union. . . .  Short as it is, almost every figure in it is distinctly outlined and freshly painted.”  Spectator, February 24, 1877

Download this week’s novel:

https://archive.org/details/isthatall00presiala

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What makes my crosswords so exceptionally adorable?  It’s not their symmetrical features; most crosswords have those.  They aren’t  rounded or fuzzy—on the contrary, they are geometrically rectilinear and semantically exact.  But their babbling delight in language, their wide-eyed, uncomplicated openness to life give them an infantile appeal very unlike the hard-edged affect of their adolescent meme-grubbing,  slang-repeating,  hipster-referencing competitors.

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Download this week’s crossword:

202-Aw,-How-Cute!.puz

202-Aw,-How-Cute!.pdf

Solve this week’s crossword online:

202 Aw, How Cute!

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A virtuous young lady has a not-so-virtuous sister.

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This was the first novel published by Frances Eleanor Trollope, for whom see Novels 033, 108; it is briefer and quieter than either of those.

“The characters are well drawn, and contrasted with satisfactory distinctness”; “the author never anticipates her catastrophes, but works up to a crisis with a cautious and self-denying reticence. . . .  She writes with that genuine feeling which is necessary to enlist the sympathies of the reader; and . . . she has the art of making revelations by a delicate touch.”  Athenaeum, August 25, 1866

“After wading through the ordinary novels of the season, after learning to what depths of dulness and folly the human intellect can descend, and wondering at the hideous pictures of vice or inanity which men and women can paint as representations of human life, it is positive mental refreshment to come across a such a book as Aunt Margaret's Trouble, which for pathos and idyllic tenderness may compete with even the best novels of the day. . . .  It is a charming book, and worth half a hundred fictions of the more ambitious and elaborate kind.”  Saturday Review, September 1, 1866

Download this week’s novel:

https://archive.org/details/auntmargaretstr00marggoog

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I went to Pismo Beach once.  I was driving with friends from San Francisco to Los Angeles and saw the sign.  The beach itself was disappointing—sand, ocean, that sort of thing.  But I liked, and still like, the name, which to me suggests a combination of the exotic with the fun.  So I’m glad I went there, because I’m glad to say I went there, because I like to say, “Pismo Beach.”

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Download this week’s crossword:

201-Pismo-Batch.puz

201-Pismo-Batch.pdf

Solve this week’s crossword online:

201 Pismo Batch

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In Cumberland, a lonely young lady, adored by a reforming clergyman, loves a swaggering mine supervisor.

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For Linton, see Novels 044, 134.  Here she sets vivid characters at cross-purposes amid a carefully realized Cumberland setting.

“Mrs. Linton, thoroughly acquainted with the life of the Lake Country, paints an imaginary dale with its lake, its fells, its force and its Styebarrow, colours it in every detail with truth to nature, shuts it out from tourist life, and peoples its nooks and corners with characters of unsophisticated Cumberland life through which she weaves the action and passion of her story. . . .  As a true picture of forms of English life that are already vanishing, this novel . . . has an interest beyond the attraction of its tale of an unhappy girl’s life beating itself out in tragic passion.”  Examiner, May 12, 1866

Linton “has chosen a subject which she can handle well. . . .  The interest of her story is greatly enhanced by the fidelity with which the local colour is preserved.” Saturday Review, July 14, 1866

Linton “makes her really original plot natural with a thousand touches of explanation . . .. and has set her figures before a background which would make them seem natural were they far more bizarre.” This is “a novel . . .  indefinitely superior to the mass of those we are so often condemned to read.” Spectator, July 21, 1866

Download this week’s novel:

http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/f/89vilt/oxfaleph014559520
(Right-click (or control-click, if you have a Mac) on the “view digitized copy” links to download the novel’s three volumes in pdf form)

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Here we are at Crossword 200, and it seems only yesterday that I was refusing to apologize for the obviousness of the theme of Crossword 100.  Anyway, as the puzzle below will show, I’ve learned nothing in the interim.  If I make it to Crossword 300, I might have to think up some other approach.

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Download this week’s crossword:

200-Something-To-See.puz

200-Something-To-See.pdf

Solve this week’s crossword online:

200 Something To See

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An old-fashioned young lady, living with her flirtatious half-sister, falls in love with a local landowner.

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Here is another novel by Sidgwick (see Novels 082, 142). It was not actually published during the Victorian period, but it is named for it—and it looks back on it with a sort of ambivalent nostalgia.

“Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick introduces one to a world in which there are always a number of delightful people, and ‘Victorian’ . . . is no exception.”  The Queenslander, July 15, 1922

Download this week’s novel:

http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/f/89vilt/oxfaleph012694025

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Ahoy! Avast! Clear the decks! Batten down the hatches! Trim the jib! Man the sheets! Belay the taffrails! Man the jib! Trim the sheets! Hoist up the John B. sail! See how the mainsail sets! Call for the captain ashore! I want to go home.

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Download this week’s crossword:

199-Breakers-Ahead.puz

199-Breakers-Ahead.pdf

Solve this week’s crossword online:

199 Breakers Ahead

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A young lady returns home to a remote Appalachian village, where she finds her father and stepmother behaving mysteriously.

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Here is another novel by Woolson, for whom see Novel 057.  This novel, however, is as focused as the other is diffuse.

“For the Major is a book few Europeans, if any, could have written, concentrating, as it does, such nervous power and earnest sentiment upon purely domestic incident. . . .  There are at least three creations in it of extreme merit” who “form a truly pathetic and truly beautiful group; very difficult to draw, but very well drawn indeed.” Academy, August 18, 1883

“The sketches of American life and character in a remote village in the south are quaint, interesting, and read life-like; and the whole slender edifice of the story, reminding us of the paper houses of Japan, holds well together.”  Spectator, August 25, 1883

Download this week’s novel:

https://archive.org/details/forthemajornovel00woolrich

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Taking my cue from the Victorian heroine who runs a risk of coming down with the brain fever if she doesn’t find a release in tears, I’ve been crying all week long, for myself, for the world, and for you, troubled solver, and I feel better now.  If you want to return the favor by crying for me, this week’s puzzle will get you started.

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Download this week’s crossword:

198-Let's-Have-a-Good-Cry.puz

198-Let's-Have-a-Good-Cry.pdf

Solve this week’s crossword online:

198 Let’s Have a Good Cry

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An orphan girl’s unusual self-possession alienates the uncle who adopts her.

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Here is another novel by Paul (see Novels 025, 136), with all its author’s usual merits.

“One of the most pleasing tales of domestic life that we have seen for many a day.” Literary Gazette, February 13, 1858

“A readable little story” with some “well drawn” characters.  Athenaeum, March 27, 1858

Download this week’s novel:

http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/f/89vilt/oxfaleph014181085
(Warning: text begins on page 23, after some black pages, and blurred pages, and pictures of a librarian’s pink-gloved hand)

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Today’s puzzle represents the equivocal position of the crossword-constructor vis-à-vis society: forced to draw upon it for words and phrases, and yet confined within a self-sufficient, cryptic world of numbered blocks and dark spaces from which there can be no escape.  It’s tragic, in a way, but oh so beautiful.

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Download this week’s crossword:

197-Neither-In-Nor-Out.puz

197-Neither-In-Nor-Out.pdf

Solve this week’s crossword online:

197 Neither In Nor Out

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A newly married couple quarrels.

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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

Download this week’s novel:

v.1 https://archive.org/details/semiattachedcoup01eden

v.2 https://archive.org/details/semiattachedcoup02eden

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Did it ever strike you that in requesting your salad dressing “on the side,” you might be interpreted as requesting either of two opposite things—that your dressing be served separately from your salad, or that your dressing be served on your salad, because it is, of course, a “side,” in restaurant-menu parlance?  Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?  So here are a few jokes on the side:

Q: What question did one ant yell across the picnic table to the other ant?
A: “Which side are you on?”

Diner 1: “Hey—did you steal my French fries?”
Diner 2: “No—I never take sides.”

Q: What do you call vegetable-induced dyspepsia?
A: A side effect!

Diner 1: “Hey—wanna split these split-peas with me?”
Diner 2: “What for? They’re already split!”
Diner 1: “Why, that’s a side-splitting joke!”

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Download this week’s crossword:

196-Side-Effects.puz

196-Side-Effects.pdf

Solve this week’s crossword online:

196 Side Effects

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A virtuous young lady loves a man unworthy of her.

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Here is another novel by the unknown but accomplished Susan Morley (see Novel 051), every bit as good as the first.  And the title is fun to pronounce!

“This is a novel of more than average merit.  It is to be highly praised for the moderation, the truly artistic moderation, with which character and incident are handled.  The plot is formed out of a perfectly natural and probable complication of social life; there is not a trace of exaggeration. . . . Every character is judiciously managed.”  Spectator, December 25, 1875

The author writes “with admirable clearness, correctness, simplicity, and refinement. . . . The action never drags.” Saturday Review, February 5, 1876

Download this week’s novel:

http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/f/89vilt/oxfaleph014799881
(Right-click (or control-click, if you have a Mac) on the “view digitized copy” links to download the novel’s three volumes in pdf form)

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I can imagine what you’re thinking: “Odd numbers!  Oh no!  Another theme consisting of an unconstrained set of words and phrases that share a certain uninteresting quality!  Why, this is the very kind of puzzle I can find anywhere these days, the kind I come to David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade specifically to avoid!”  Well, don’t worry, imaginary solver, that’s not what this is about.  In fact it was inspired by that most interesting volume in the new AMA-sponsored book series on the endearing quirks of medical professionals—Odd Numbers, by Ann S. Thesiologist.

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Download this week’s crossword:

195-Odd-Numbers.puz

195-Odd-Numbers.pdf

Solve this week’s crossword online:

195 Odd Numbers