Irene Iddesleigh

About the book

Irene, adopted into the Dilworth household, approaches marriage to Sir John Dunfern amid preparations that emphasize wealth, rank, and public happiness. Her feelings for her tutor, Oscar Otwell, complicate the apparent triumph, while the financial pressures surrounding the arrangement expose motives that ceremony keeps discreetly out of sight. The story develops through divided loyalties, secrecy, and the gulf between outward prosperity and emotional confinement. Amanda McKittrick Ros gives these events an exceptionally ornate verbal form: abstractions become physical forces, metaphors accumulate, and ordinary transitions swell into emphatic declarations. This 1897 novel is therefore distinctive as much for the way it narrates distress as for the romantic predicament itself. Reading attentively means following both the characters' choices and the language that insists upon magnifying them.

• Marriage and constraint
• Secret attachment
• Appearance and feeling

Why read it

The extravagant prose makes this a singular encounter with the expressive possibilities and hazards of melodramatic narration.

English text of the Belfast 1897 edition