Word: quincunx
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Letitia Davenant, wife of Thaddeus and mother of a 4 1/2-month-old daughter named Georgina. It was Letitia's inheritance that allowed her husband to refurbish his ancestral home, Quincunx House in Essex, to its former splendor. Before he married her, Thaddeus had been reduced to selling local markets the produce he grew on his property. So he is grateful to Letitia but harbors a pained secret that occurs to him again on the afternoon of her death: "It was his considerable loss, Thaddeus was every day aware, that he did not love his wife...
...introduces and then solves in Death in Summer. Letitia's death raises a practical problem: how to care for the infant daughter. Mrs. Iveson, Thaddeus' mother-in-law, suggests that he advertise for a nanny and agrees to help him interview the applicants. Four young women eventually arrive at Quincunx House, none of them found suitable for the post by Mrs. Iveson. She then volunteers to sublet her London apartment and take over Georgina's upbringing herself. Reluctantly, Thaddeus consents...
...spurned nanny applicants is Pettie, an unstable kleptomaniac in her early 20s who grew up in the Morning Star, a London home for unwanted children. Her interview at Quincunx House has left her enchanted with the beauty and serenity of the place, so at odds with the conditions of her own childhood, and stirred by her meeting with the handsome, fortyish widower who owns it. She assumes, correctly, that she was barred from this paradise by "the old woman," Mrs. Iveson. Pettie begins making daily train trips to spy on the Davenant household and exact revenge...
...Quincunx by Charles Palliser. Roughly half a million words long, this extravagant narrative is a faithful re-creation of the 19th century British novel -- lots of them, including Bleak House, Great Expectations and Jane Eyre. Miraculously, this bald-faced imitation works wonders. The author makes the distant world of Victorian fiction, with its careful plotting and moral punctiliousness, as gripping as tomorrow's whodunit...
...QUINCUNX by Charles Palliser (Ballantine; $25). At 788 pages, this first novel seems designed for a more leisurely age. It was. The author's faithful pastiche of Victorian fiction -- with its careful plotting and moral punctiliousness -- miraculously springs to life...