I had been aware of Miriam Benn for some years, because I kept coming across her trail in libraries: her borrower's slips between the pages of books, her signature as a user of special collections, librarians' memories of an Australian woman scholar spending her vacations researching in Britain. Unhappily for me, she was obviously investigating that enormously important, mysterious and unexplored Victorian figure: George Drysdale. She was certainly doing this as well as I was - perhaps much better. Worst of all, the spoor was old, the campfire ashes long extinguished. It appeared that any minute the world would hear, if not the whole truth about George Drysdale, then at least a great part of it.

LRB 22 October 1992 | PDF Download