A girl from a poor Devon household is loved by a man who cannot marry her, pursued by one who can, and made the subject of a will that nobody understands. Charles Garvice sold seven million books in his lifetime and was the most popular English novelist nobody now reads. The machinery is unashamed; what survives is the pace, which is why the plot never stops moving for a page. Fifty-five plates of Victorian and Edwardian painting, from William Shiels to George Reid, give the rural Devon of the novel its faces and its weather.
