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A Simpleton

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The basic theme of this novel is how a worldly, intelligent man comes to appreciate the qualities of his extravagant though sweetly innocent wife, whom everyone calls "the simpleton." Dr. Christopher Staines marries Rosa Lusignan, a poor manager of money and all things domestic; Staines is forced to drive a hack incognito at night to make ends meet. When this fails, he sails to South Africa with a wealthy family as caretaker of their ill daughter. Along the way it's reported that Staines falls overboard and drowns. When he reaches Cape Town he decides to let the rumor of his death stand as fact so that Rosa can enjoy the life insurance money due her. But then the unscrupulous Reginald Falcon, aware of the situation, sails to England to get Rosa to marry him for her money. He wins her by faking the kidnapping of her son and then returning him to her posing as his rescuer. Feeling obligated to Falcon now, she is just about to succumb to him when Staines returns and saves his wife.

No Reade novel would be complete without his advocating certain social issues; here he speaks out for the importance of having life insurance, against the difficulties of establishing a medical practice, for alternate means of mining diamonds, and even a warning against the wearing of tight corsets. Sometimes Reade can be incongruous or careless when it comes to practical plot matters: Falcon is married all the time he's pursuing Rosa (in fact, his wife comes chasing after him like a sick puppy - perhaps the most incredible scenes in the book), and Staines's change of heart about the "advantages" of having a "simpleton" wife comes out of the blue and seems to be there for effect only.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is its Preface where Reade defends himself against the charge of plagiarism: "All fiction, worth a button, is founded on facts; and it doesn't matter one straw whether the facts are taken from personal experiences, hearsay, or printed books; only those books must not be works of fiction." In other words, he believed all facts are in the public domain and therefore were at his disposal for use in his novels. Here he defends the extraordinary amount of research he conducted before writing each novel. No novel by Reade was ever totally worthless; this one falls somewhere in the middle rank of his works.