Helen in Bloomington, MN

This is Oswald Sickert's delicate examination of two middle-class, late-Victorian characters - an ambitious writer and his wife, a freshly liberated woman - and their rather modern relationship. It has been more than a century since this book first appeared (in 1894, in Unwin's 'Pseudonym Library' - where Sickert's pseudonym was simply 'Oswald Valentine') but the anxieties of modern lives lived in a period of transition will be quite familiar to most twenty-first century readers. Oswald Valentine Sickert was the younger brother of Walter Sickert, the famous painter and student of Whistler. The Sickerts were a very well-connected family. Their home was the social hub of an influential circle of artists and critics, and Cambridge-educated Oswald was the family favorite. Among his friends were Edward Marsh and Bertrand Russell.