Guy Deverell [Paperback]

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1984

This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Dover Pubns; First edition & printing in this form edition (June 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0486246183
• ISBN-13: 978-0486246185
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,464,444 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Gothic with a little depth, January 27, 2001

By 

Michael L. Moore (Cedar Falls, IA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Guy Deverell (His The collected works of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu)

After reading and enjoying a number of Le Fanu's ghost stories, I discovered that he has considerable skill in handling longer narratives as well. Because of some let-down in the last two or three chapters, I give Guy Deverell three stars.

The main characters include Sir Jekyl Marlowe, a womanizing baronet; Monsieur Varbarriere/Herbert Strangways, his archenemy and ultimately his nemesis; Lady Alice Redcliffe, Sir Jekyl's mother-in-law and chief critic; Guy Strangways/Deverell, Lady Alice's grandson, the true heir to one of Sir Jekyl's country houses and the living facsimile of the Guy Deverell Sir Jekyl killed in an unfairly-fought duel many years before; Beatrix, Sir Jekyl's daughter; Lady Jane Lennox, Sir Jekyl's lover, the beautiful wife of an elderly general; house party guests, servants, lawyers, doctors, innkeepers and their lackeys...

The plot revolves around Varbarriere's efforts to work his revenge on Sir Jekyl by putting forward his nephew's claim to property rightly his, involving deeds stolen from Lady Alice's son, an older Guy Deverell, many years before, the theft occurring in "the Green Room," a chamber Sir Jekyl's father added onto the family house with secret doors and passages attached for the sake of his own amorous trysting long ago. Sir Harry's son, we learn, uses its special features in the same way his old Dad did, currently with Lady Jane Lennox.

Le Fanu sets the story in the context of an October house party, lasting for weeks, with guests coming and going and coming back, some of the guests major figures--Varbarriere and the Lennoxes--others, like Captain Drayton, the Blunket family and others added to the canvas for contrast or humor. Le Fanu has the knack of unfolding character through dialogue, and even relatively flat characters stick in a reader's mind thanks to conversations he records between them or with the majors.

I particularly appreciated the way Le Fanu deepened each of the main characters. None of them is a flat, stock-Gothic figure--Varbarriere occasionally ponders whether to renounce his revenge, Sir Jekyl gradually comes to repentance, albeit too late, for how he wronged the elder Guy Deverell and the women in his life, Lady Jane eventually 'gets religion:' not what one expects in a Victorian Gothic. Nor is Le Fanu's mildly ironic narrative voice what I had expected to find--he writes very consciously, a detached and poised practitioner of his art.

I would recommend seeking Guy Deverell out to anyone interested in reading more by the vast number of authors who were not themselves first-rate general novelists, but provided the reading public of their generation solid, dependable entertainment which still has power to amuse and divert readers in the 21st century.

The edition I own is the Dover Press reprint of the 1866 Bentley edition, ISBN 0-486-24618-3. Dover's reprint was published in paperback in 1984.