The Spectator.—‘Merit, graphic force, and excellent local colouring are conspicuous in Mrs. Steel’s From the Five Rivers, and the short stories of which the volume is composed are evidently the work of a lady who knows what she is writing about.’
The Glasgow Herald.—‘This is a collection of sketches of Hindu life, full for the most part of brilliant colouring and cleverly wrought in dialect. The writer evidently knows her subject, and she writes about it with unusual skill.’
The North British Daily Mail.—‘In at least two of the sketches in Mrs. Steel’s book we have a thoroughly descriptive delineation of life in Indian, or rather, Hindoo, villages. “Ganesh Chunel” is little short of a masterpiece, and the same might be said of “Shah Sujah’s Mouse.” In both we are made the spectator of the conditions of existence in rural India. The stories are told with an art that conceals the art of story-telling.’
The Athenæum.—‘They possess this great merit, that they reflect the habits, modes of life, and ideas of the middle and lower classes of the population of Northern India better than do systematic and more pretentious works.’
The Leeds Mercury.--‘By no means a book to neglect.... It is written with brains.... Mrs. Steel understands the life which she describes, and she has sufficient literary art to describe it uncommonly well. These short stories of Indian life are, in fact, quite above the average of stories long or short.... There is originality, insight, sympathy, and a certain dramatic instinct in the portrayal of character about the book.’
The Globe.—‘She puts before us the natives of our Empire in the East as they live and move and speak, with their pitiful superstitions, their strange fancies, their melancholy ignorance of what poses with us for knowledge and civilisation, their doubt of the new ways, the new laws, the new people. “Shah Sujah’s Mouse,” the gem of the collection—a touching tale of unreasoning fidelity towards an English "Sinny Baba"—is a tiny bit of perfect writing.’
London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 Bedford Street, W.C.
THE LAST SENTENCE
By MAXWELL GRAY