Mary Jane Married: Tales of a Village Inn
MARY JANE MARRIED UNIFORM WITH THE PRESENT VOLUME. Post 8vo, illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth, 2s. 6d. MARY JANE’S MEMOIRS. By GEORGE R. SIMS. WITH A PHOTOGRAPHED PORTRAIT OF MARY JANE.
“A quite Defoe-like revelation. It is, in effect, a series of social sketches drawn by a keen and humorous observer. Can be heartily recommended to all and sundry.”— Globe.
“A very entertaining autobiography.... Mary Jane has a faculty for observing character, and a power of delineating its movements and development, not distantly related to those of Mr. Sims himself. Mary Jane has so full a fund of exciting incident to draw upon, and so pleasant a manner of philosophizing, in her homely way, upon the ups and downs of a servant’s life, that should she ever take the field as a novelist independently of her present sponsor, he will have a formidable rival to contend with.”— Scotsman.
“Mr. Sims has portrayed in an amusing manner the trials, woes, and triumphs of domestic servants. There is such an amount of truthfulness in the narrative that we can almost accept the portrait of Mary Jane as that of the authoress of the memoirs Mr. Sims is supposed to edit, and to believe that it is really genuine.”— Metropolitan.
“There are some pages in these memoirs which it is impossible to read without laughing heartily, while the chapters devoted to the account of the Chelsea mystery are almost tragic in their intense realism.... Dickens never did anything better than ‘Mrs. Three-doors-up,’ or ‘Mr. Saxon, the author, and his mother-in-law.’. The book is full of unvarnished naturalism of a healthy, sensible, wholesome kind. It is quite the best thing Mr. Sims has yet written.”— Whitehall Review.
“Those who have not yet made Miss Buffham’s acquaintance will here find in her a very entertaining narrator of vast experiences in the way of domestic service.”— Daily News.
“Much of the book is broad comedy, and most laughter-provoking, and reminds one of the best of the famous ‘Mrs. Brown.’. Generally, the book is remarkable for its Defoe-like verisimilitude, and added to this is an inexhaustible fund of humour and broad though harmless fun.”— Public Opinion.