John Owen, once a cotton broker, wrote a novel, The Cotton Broker, six years ago, for which Britons laid down many a clutch of seven shillings. This year the shillings are rattling down again because Novelist Owen, a tall man who might pass for a giant, has written The Giant of Oldborne.— As a yardstick to current British taste in fiction the book will stand branding with the cliche "important."
No doubt beef-eaters consider that in writing The Giant of Old-borne Novelist Owen was doing a Tolstoi. For hero there is a "sensitive" youth—the adjective is repeated ad nauseam—a sensitive youth who was as weak as a girl because all his strength went into making him a great tall bag of bones whom any knotty runt could upset into a helpless heap. For heroine he represents a buxom milk wench—the scene is rural Suffolk "these many years ago"—who has a taste which she herself considers monstrous for the hero-monstrosity. She has no love for him but likes to torture "with the least possible effort to herself" this sensitive bag — of bones. The spectacle is on the order of a fat little girl tearing apart a daddy-long-legs.
If the novel is semiautobiographical, as its publishers hint darkly, then one can understand the author's readiness to be as garrulous in recalling his wounds of the spirit as an old soldier describing the carnage at Appomattox. That the book is carefully written—and perhaps for that reason especially appreciated by Britons, now in rebellion against the loose writing of the day-there is no doubt. But there is the feeling of words too long sought, too painstakingly chosen. For example a stream "wimples."
Wife of Bath Ahoy!
Reader!
If thou hast a Heart fam'd for Tenderness and Pity, Contemplate this Spot.
In which are deposited the Remains of a young Lady, whose artless Beauty, innocence of Mind, and gentle Manners, once obtain'd her the Love and Esteem of all who knew her, But when Nerves were too delicately spun to bear the rude Shakes and Jostlings which we meet with in this transitory World, Nature gave way; she sunk and died a Martyr to Excessive Sensibility.