If a 19th-century paternity exists for [A Villa in France], it is surely in the mannered accomplishments of George Meredith, who is credited in passing with being the most recent novelist to be studied in the Oxford English School. A Villa in France has that beguiling property—so eminently characteristic of Meredith—of seeming to slide more or less uncontrollably between epochs. This is partly because the characters themselves seem to be based as much on well-known fictional prototypes as on anything specific to period and place: the Rev. Henry Rich is described on the first page as coming 'straight out of Mansfield Park', and it is a matter for debate whether he succeeds in emerging from that rarefied world. It is partly because Henry Rich's obsession with Time—which at one point he characterises as moving in our imaginations from left to right, like the reading...