Maurice Hewlett
Life and career
Maurice Hewlett (1861–1923) was an English novelist, poet, and essayist who trained in law and held a government post concerned with medieval records. The success of The Forest Lovers encouraged him to devote himself to literature. His range included historical romances, travel writing about Italy, and fiction drawing on Icelandic sagas, as well as stories closer to contemporary English life. Love and Lucy belongs to that wider career rather than to a single historical setting shared by all his books. Readers can follow how his narrative voice turns outwardly ordinary relationships into occasions for heightened feeling, while questioning the difference between a character's desires and the narrator's account of them.
Romance claimed for ordinary middle life
Love and Lucy opens by insisting that romance belongs inside respectable contemporary lives, not only among pirates or distant adventurers. The narrator proposes hidden inner selves beneath the Macartneys’ outwardly settled existence. That intervention is important: the book does not simply let domestic events speak for themselves, but announces a theory of how readers should look beneath social appearance.
A dinner party in Onslow Square
The available edition appeared in 1916. Its first scene turns from the narrator’s expansive claims to preparations for a dinner party. Lucy’s joke about their child altering the unlucky number of guests meets her husband’s unresponsive seriousness. The small exchange gives a concrete social scale to the larger contrast between inward possibility and habitual outward behaviour.
Question the narrator’s generalizations
Attend to the difference between an observed exchange and a broad statement about men or women. Hewlett’s narrator moves readily between them, and that movement supplies both wit and interpretation. Compare the imaginative language surrounding hidden souls with the practical details of household sociability. The romantic claim becomes more interesting when tested against these particular voices, rather than accepted as an explanation before the characters have acted.