Blog
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Prior to the two Australian newspaper series we’re using to reconstruct The Mystery of the Marsh, the novel appeared serialized in the New York Ledger during the period December 1882 — March 1883. You may recall that Smith moved from Europe to the United States in 1870, residing there until his death in 1890. According… Read more
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The scene shifts to Paris, where Smith can draw upon his youthful experience of bohemian life in the Latin Quarter. A character in our upper echelon has gone there to take care of some … unfinished business — of the serious kind. Here we meet a new brand of character, a detective by the name… Read more
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What a presumption of Burcham’s that Lady Kate’s cousin Clara Meredith will drop everything and marry him because an inheritance of five thousand a year hinges on it! He doesn’t need Mr. Brit to tell him there will be possibly much more for him when her father dies, issues of marriage and inheritance dictating the… Read more
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Almost a century and a half has passed since Smith launched his penny blood, so it is natural that a mere aside by the narrator can set off a question mark that repays investigation. In considering the theory of literature, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur describes how a text moves from the world of human experience,… Read more
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Margaret Oliphant’s essay ‘The Byways of Literature: Reading for the Million’ (1858) is something of a seminal study in literature and popular culture. Her elegant piece is by turns endearing — particularly in her approval of our man Smith — and a worry for its tone of condescension towards ‘the Million,’ meaning the multitude, the ‘lower… Read more
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