Robert Orange

About the book

Continuing The School for Saints, this novel returns to Robert Orange as personal commitment and public promise draw competing claims upon him. In the London of 1869, Lady Sara de Treverell weighs marriage prospects against her desire for influence, while Lord Reckage's religious and political association reveals how easily ideals become entangled with vanity. Orange's impending marriage provokes judgments from friends who see both affection and career through their own interests. John Oliver Hobbes places these conversations within a larger concern for conscience, ambition, and the cost of fidelity to an inward standard. Witty social analysis repeatedly exposes the distance between declared motives and actual ones. The sequel treats political opportunity and romantic attachment as interdependent pressures rather than separate departments of a successful life.

• Ambition and conscience
• Marriage and influence
• Faith and social performance

Why read it

The sharp conversations make public ideals and private calculations visible at the same time.

English text of the 1900 T. Fisher Unwin edition; sequel to The School for Saints