His third book, which we seem to have had in the house for years, but I had never read.
One girl, 2 men in love with her. Friends prior to meeting her but very different men. She is about to elope with the first, but her father disapproves of the match; the 2nd then appears, woos her, but cannot accept the existence of her former love for another man. So she is torn between the 2, but ultimately scorned by both.
She ends up marrying a third party, but dies in childbirth as they both travel down to Cornwall intending to try to win her back. The girl, Elfrieda, is prominent in the early bits of the book but slightly sidelined, I think narratively incorrectly, towards the end, where the 2 men dominate the plot. So she becomes invisible to the reader, whereas her behaviour and responses to them are important in the first half.
In a way, I enjoyed this more than some of his more celebrated novels which I have tried to re read over the last few years.
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