In The Dark Daughters Mr. Rhys Davies plunges the reader into a Victorian world of passionate hates;… he has a weakness for melodrama (visible at times through the rich exterior) and the ability to evoke a sickly miasma. Mansell, a chemist, is an adventurer with luck; by keeping shady houses around Paddington he amasses the fortune for which he had craved. For years he plunders the world, using those around him with cynical disregard for their humanity. In the end he is brought to book, first by his conscience and then by his three terrible daughters who, when they are grown up, pursue him with a single-minded ferocity. Not even King Lear, whose story this part of the book closely follows, suffered such a ruin of personal relationships and feelings. All this is luridly described, but the story is so excellently contrived that it has a fascination of...