The Passionate Elopement is a sparkling satire of manners set in Curtain Wells, a fashionable inland spa where health cures, flirtation, gossip, and social display are all part of the same ritual. From the disciplined morning promenades at the Pump Room to masquerades, valentine schemes, tea tables, and carefully staged public entertainments, the novel delights in exposing the absurd machinery of high society while celebrating its wit and theatrical energy. At the center is Phyllida Courte...

Poor Relations follows John Touchwood, a witty but self-dramatizing playwright whose life is thrown into comic confusion by success, gossip, and the demands of family. On the Atlantic crossing home from New York, he basks in theatrical triumphs, rereads affectionate and exasperating letters from relatives, and falls into a flirtation with the reserved Miss Hamilton and her sharp companion Miss Merritt. What begins as an amused, romantic voyage soon exposes the gap between John's public cha...

Jasmine Grant arrives alone at York railway station, exhausted after a long journey from southern Italy to the chill of the north, and at once feels herself a stranger in England. Draggled, grieving, and out of place, she wanders the city walls in a state of exile and memory, mourning the island home of Sirene, her dead father, and the mother she barely knew. Compton Mackenzie turns her displacement into a social comedy of loss, where family obligation is as bewildering as the climate. A f...

In Plashers Mead, Compton Mackenzie follows Guy Hazlewood as he arrives in the countryside to begin a self-chosen life at his new home, bringing his books, his hopes, and his unease with him. Across the turning seasons of a single year, the novel traces his attempt to live as a poet in rural seclusion, balancing ambition, loneliness, and the comic inconveniences of daily existence. His father's stern, practical letter makes clear how precarious that freedom is, setting artistic aspiration ...

In these vivid Kensington poems, an ordinary house, a square, and a round pond are transformed through a child's imagination into a whole world of wonder, embarrassment, rivalry, and fear. The speaker moves from family rooms and social rituals to dancing class, parties, and playground games, observing childhood with playful wit and a sharp eye for manners, teasing, and longing. As the collection unfolds, make-believe grows grander: toy ships become epic naval battles, and even small mishap...

CONTENTS: ALEXANDER PUSHKIN 1. The Queen of Spades ALGERNON BLACKWOOD: 2. Confession 3. S. O. S. 4. The Wings of Horus ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE 5. B. 24 ARTHUR O. FRIEL: 6. The Spider 7. The Vulture ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH: 8. Statement of Gabriel Foot, Highwayman 9. The Affair of Bleakirk-on-Sands 10. The Countess of Bellarmine ARTHUR STRINGER: 11. The Adolescence of Number Eighty-Seven 12. The Button Thief 13. The Wire-Tappers ARTHUR TRAIN: 14. Extradition 15. The Baron de Ville 16. The Golden To...

THE meagre sun that for thirteen pallid February days had shone with no more brilliance than a rushlight stuck amid the cobwebs of a garret, poured down at last his profuse glories, and Curtain Wells woke up to a fine morning and the burden of conscious existence, with an effort all the more completely unanimous on account of its reputation as an inland Spa. Residence there implied an almost monastick ideal of regularity. Other shrines of Æsculapius, falling from their primitive purity of ...

CONTENTS:ALGERNON BLACKWOODConfessionARTHUR B. REEVE2. The Beauty MaskARTHUR CONAN DOYLE3 to 14. The Adventures of Sherlock HolmesARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH15. The Affair of Bleakirk-on-SandsARTHUR STANWOOD PIER16. The Best FriendARTHUR STRINGER17. The Adolescence of Number Eighty-Seven18. The Bell19. The Benevolence of Montana Bill20. The Button ThiefBARRY PAIN

The Best Works of Compton MacKenzieCarnivalGuy and PaulinePlashers MeadSinister Street, vol. 1Sylvia & MichaelThe Altar StepsThe Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett

Michael Fane arrives in the thin red house in Carlington Road to his new family of Nurse, Cook, Annie the housemaid, his younger sister Stella, and the occasional presence of Mother. From here, the novel follows the next twenty years of his life as he tries to find his place in the upper echelons of Edwardian society, through prep school, studies at Oxford, and his emergence into the wide world. The setting is rich in period detail, and the characters portrayed are vivid and more nuanced i...

From a world of daisies as big as moons and of mountainous green hillocks Michael Fane came by some unrealized method of transport to the thin red house, that as yet for his mind could not claim an individual existence amid the uniformity of a long line of fellows. His arrival coincided with a confusion of furniture, with the tramp of men backwards and forwards from a cavernous vehicle very dry and dusty. He found himself continually being lifted out of the way of washstands and skeleton c...

"Sinister Street" is a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, that follows the life and experiences of its protagonist, Michael Fane. The novel begins with Michael's childhood in the fictional English village of Scarsmoor and traces his journey to adulthood in London.As Michael grows older, he becomes increasingly disillusioned with the constraints of small-town life and yearns for adventure and excitement. Against the wishes of his family, he decides to move to London to pursue his dreams...