Occasionally, in amongst the modern novels and detective fiction that make up most of my reading, I read a "classic" with some vague notion of self-improvement. However, this one took more than six months to finish; I read several others while I was reading it to relieve the tedium.

I'm not totally sure why I didn't enjoy this more. It has all the ingredients of a blockbusting Dallas-style soap opera, albeit set a couple of hundred years ago. It is very long, over 800 pages of small type, which probably didn't help. I also found the author a bit too knowing, trying to tell the audience what they should think and being slightly sneering about how people behaved 40 years earlier (the book is set around 1830 but was written around 1870).

As an interesting aside, the book does give a very brief mention of the town in which I now live, at that time very much the fashionable place to visit:
"Sir James was much pained, and offered that they should all migrate to Cheltenham for a few months ... at that time a man could hardly know what to propose if Cheltenham were rejected".

Popped in the post to bookcrosser ShadowPi.

Received in the post today. Will journal again once read. Thanks FizzyPig.