A novel presenting the political and social order existing in London a hundred years ago. William Ashe, a rising young statesman of English solidity and force, falls in love with Lady Kitty, beautiful, eighteen, just released from a French convent, and neglected by a mother of doubtful reputation. He marries her and she leads him gayly from one scandal to another, ridiculing his influential friends, making enemies of the prime minister, Lord Parham and his wife, and capping all by writing a bitterly real satire upon the social set in which her marriage has placed her. A fragile, captivating creature of varying moods, with an hereditary moral madness in her blood, she holds our interest, excites our pity, and dominates the book. But there are other characters; William’s mother, the strong aristocratic Englishwoman, Mary Lyster, cold, narrow, and selfishly hard, and Geoffrey Cliffe—a villain with a dash of genius, whose power over Kitty began with her desire to penetrate the secret history of a man whose poems filled her with a thrilling sense of feeling and passion beyond her ken.

“It is one of the best that Mrs. Humphry Ward has written, the chief fault of it being the wearisome middle. The work is not organically built up, and though the interest revives towards the end we still feel that the book is imperfect. One can well understand that it would have been twice as good if Mrs. Humphry Ward possessed the saving gift of humour, but she takes many things in life and particularly her own sex much too seriously.”

+ + —Acad. 68: 227. Mr. 11, ‘05. 1570w.

“It is not in any real sense a remarkable book. There is little or nothing in it that has not been given before both by the writer herself and by others. The hand of the experienced literary artist is visible—too visible in fact.”

+ + —Ath. 1905, 1: 332. Mr. 18. 730w.

“Considered not as a problem, but simply as a study in incompatibility, ‘The marriage of William Ashe’ is a piece of subtle and delicate workmanship.” Frederic Taber Cooper.

+ + —Bookm. 21: 269. My. ‘05. 500w.

“In spite of its lack of humor the book is never dull.” C. Harwood.

+Critic. 46: 472. My. ‘05. 640w.

“The interest of the work is sustained, rising to an effective dramatic climax, and subsiding into the pathos of a closing scene of deathbed repentance and forgiveness.” William Morton Payne.