The book started interestingly enough. Pierre Glendinning, the apple of his mother's eye and the beloved son of a well respected family, discovers that his father, whose character he thought was irreproachable, had an illegitimate daughter by a French refugee who mysteriously disappeared. He meets this half-sister, Isabel (or she claims to be his half-sister), and, in order to ensure that she is taken care of gets part of his father's estate, he pretends to be married to her and alienates both his mother and fiancee.
After the point where he moves to the city and sets up housekeeping with his "wife" and a dishonored young woman named Delly from his village who has no place else to go, the storyline all went to hell pretty fast, going through all kinds of incoherent melodramatic twists and turns. I only finished the book because I figured I had already gone this far and there was a chance it might improve (this is <i>Melville</i>, the literary giant, after all), but it didn't. I have since read somewhere that Melville may have written it to spite his publisher, who wanted him to produce more saleable conventional potboilers--so he deliberately made a mess of this one.
I gave it 2 stars because there are some beautiful passages in this book, but it was too weird for me. But then, Gothic novels in general aren't my thing anyway. I read the <A HREF="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34970">Gutenberg ebook</A> of this title.
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