None So Pretty

None So Pretty describes, with a sensibility and conviction unusual in historical fiction, the life of a young girl brought up in a large, aristocratic, but impecunious family, and married off at an early age to a neighbouring squire who nightly drinks himself under the table. It is not long before the young wife discovers that her sottish husband keeps a mistress at his lodge gates, and that he does not propose to consummate his marriage. Relief from a life of intolerable loneliness comes in the form of a young cavalier who stumbles into her bedroom one night after a hearty carouse downstairs, and the acquaintance thus started swiftly ripens into a deeper affection. To disclose the final sequence of events in this curious drama would be to spoil the story for a prospective reader; one must be content to conclude that by commending Miss Irwin's fascinatingly life-like and original characters, and her gift for creating vivid, unforgettable mental pictures.

Autorentext

Margaret Irwin (1889-1969) was educated at Clifton High School in Bristol, and then at Oxford University. She began writing books and short stories in the early 1920s. She married children's author and illustrator John Robert Monsell in 1929.

Irwin was praised for her historical accuracy in her novels, and she wrote passionately about the English Civil War. In The Proud Servant she caused generations to fall in love with the ill-fated but charismatic Earl of Montrose, Charles I's Commander in Scotland.