SOURCE: “The O'Brian Touch,” in Raritan: A Quarterly Review, Vol. 16, No. 1, Summer, 1996, pp. 116–31.

In the following essay, Edwards offers a positive assessment of the Aubrey/Maturin series, stating that the novels transcend mere genre writing.

Admirers of Patrick O'Brian's historical novels sometimes think of the literate English-speaking world as divided into three parts: themselves, people who haven't yet read the books, and those—so few as to be negligible—who do know but don't like them. The second group may need to hear that there are now seventeen novels dealing with the adventures during the Napoleonic wars of Captain John Aubrey, R.N., and his shipmate and close friend Dr. Stephen Maturin, physician, naturalist, and intelligence agent.

Our sense of who we are includes memories of the reading that brought us pleasure and illumination at the right time; Keats on Chapman's Homer and King Lear is more candid...