The story opens in 1712, and is a story of the habits, customs, loves and hates of a gentle family of those days. We pay particular attention to two young women, Rhoda and Phoebe. Of course your reviewer never did live in those days, but the style of life of these minor grandees seems to ring true, as one would expect of this skilled author. As with her other historical novels, the reader seems to feel pulled into the contemporary scene of those days and that class: their foolish airs and graces, their ambition, in most cases, to marry at or above their "station".

Amid a welter of other minor grandees appears one Mr. Welles, who is said to be well placed with an income of three thousand pounds a year, to be compared with one of the players in the story, a curate with 21 pounds a year with which to bring up his large brood. But he turns out to be greedy, and makes a bid for one of the two young women, who, he imagines, is to inherit a large and valuable estate. But he has made a mistake, and much of the latter part of the book deals with the way in which he tries to recover his position, and is, of course, rebuffed.

Emily Sarah Holt, 1836 to 1893.

There doesn't seem to be much information easily available about Emily Sarah Holt. She is not mentioned in "The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature". She wrote about fifty books, mainly for children, and published over a rather short period of her life. Most of her books could be classified as Historical Novels.

I have an impression from snatches I have read that she lived in a rather upper middle class part of London, which we would call today "South Kensington". It may be significant that she died in 1893 for there was a major flu epidemic that year, which lasted a couple of years after that.

Somebody wrote recently that second-hand copies of her books in good condition are in short supply because her readers a hundred years ago and more so much loved reading their copies that they "read them to bits". This may be a bookseller's hype, but there must be a grain of truth in it. It may well also be true of all the authors we present on, or in conjunction with, the Athelstane website.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century, and sometimes earlier than that. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read either here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk