Charles Reade Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Wayne Burns

Critical Essay by Wayne Burns

SOURCE: "Griffith Gaunt: 'The Great Passions that Poets Have Sung,'" in Charles Reade: A Study in Victorian Authorship, Bookman Associates, 1961, pp. 231-67.

In the following excerpt, Burns discusses Reade's portrayal of feminine psychology and sexuality in Griffith Gaunt.

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In the midst of this turmoil [over the stage version of It Is Never Too Late to Mend] Reade still managed to keep up his Notebooks, and to start work on a new novel, although, duplicating the practice he had followed after completing his prison epic, he did not immediately attempt another matter-of-fact romance. After Hard Cash and The Cloister that would have been too strenuous. Instead he essayed another and to his way of thinking less demanding type of novel. "It is a tale of the heart," he wrote Fields (Oct. 13, 1865), "and does not straggle into any eccentric topics. Need I say I shall make it as exciting...
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