Sublime

Comments on Verena, as the County drove home, were entirely favourable. ‘A very sensible girl,’ said Ann Rothley and her husband grunted assent, but said he was surprised that Quin, who’d had such beautiful girlfriends, was willing to marry somebody who, when all was said and done, looked like a Roman senator. His wife disagreed. ‘She has great pre

she was “a wrinkled old fairy all the same.”

As it is, she never stops. Cooks and gardens and entertains and reads everything she can lay her hands on, and listens to music, and rings people up and has long, satisfying conversations. Sometimes she takes herself off abroad to stay with old friends. France, usually.

It was summer, and the light was tinged with pink.

She seemed to me, in her blond prettiness, so tender, so appealing, so bewitching, that it was impossible to believe he had not more thoughts for all this than for the pretty fortune which it yet bothered me to believe that he must, like a good Italian, have taken the exact measure of. His own worldly goods consisted of the paternal estate, a villa

Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796) are by Frances (or Fanny) Burney; Belinda (1801) is by Maria Edgeworth. Burney, the most acclaimed novelist of the late eighteenth century, was, along with Samuel Richardson, the most important influence on Jane Austen’s work. Burney’s novels consistently focus on the tribulations—romantic and otherwise—of a young