Customer Reviews

Beyond the City

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One thing I love about my Kindle and rise of the e-books is that so many classics are free. Otherwise, I never would have bought this book. Actually, I never even heard of it. The freeness made it very appealing.

It is about a suburb of London where three families converge. The three have a variety of problems that only seem to happen in Victorian England--bad brother who scams family members for money and then does a physical attack for revenge, the 'new' game of tennis, the launch of women's rights, and other issues that is so "England".

It was a cute and short story but not one I would ever want to pay for! If you're reading the classics, stick with other English authors and if you want Doyle, then stick with his Holmes stories. Cute, but that's about it.

This 1893 novella from the creator of Sherlock Holmes is a reminder that Arthur Conan Doyle was a productive writer across many decades, who worked in genres other than detective fiction. This is a lightweight social comedy, easily read in a couple of hours. It really does not have quite enough going for it to attain classic status--Diary of a Nobody by the Grossmith brothers runs circles around it in wit, invention, style and what it divulges about Late Victorian middle class suburban society.

This is the story of four families that live in a new subdivision of the McMansion counterpart of suburban London in the 1890s. There are the elderly spinster sisters, stalwarts of Victorian manners, out of whose family land the subdivision was created; a widower doctor and his two marriageable daughters; a recently retired naval admiral, his wife and adult son; and another young man and his aunt, an attractive woman of a certain age, who stridently advocates suffrage, who is an adventurer and popular lecturer. There ensues some couplings--the daughters and the son and nephew and the doctor and the aunt, but then there are the necessary complications to true love. Two of the three couplings will survive, but all end up happy. The sisters provide amusing perspective of the goings on. Masterpiece Classic could take this and with the right cast and stylish approach make a winsome production.

This edition is print on demand. The cover is thick, glossy photo stock, the back cover has a minimal description, and the interior is laid out competently (not all PODs are, believe me) but is minimal, with no critical introduction to put this in context.