The title sounds like a novel, and the book can and should be read like one - a very remarkable one. Philip Larkin, who had the knack of making sideways critical comments as memorable as those in his verse, remarked that 'the first thing a novelist must provide is a separate world,' and it is true that the world Dr Green has made out of the relationship of Mark Pattison and Meta Bradley is not exactly a separate world. It is a familiar one, familiar from memoirs and gossip and our general contemporary interest in the Victorian age, but Green has managed - perhaps quite inadvertently - to see it all from a slightly different angle.

LRB 23 January 1986 | PDF Download