[Gutenberg 31106] • Brooke's Daughter / A Novel

From The Spectator, 26 SEPTEMBER 1891, Page 20

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The novel is well named, for though we have the in- evitable love-affair, and the almost inevitable villain, who provides what is called the " plot-interest," the central motive of the book is supplied by the unusual relations between Caspar Brooke, the unconventional and philan- thropic journalist, and the girl Leslie, who comes from the French convent school to spend a year with the father of whom she has known nothing but that her beloved mother had left him years before, and that he still lived somewhere and somehow. The story of Leslie's success in bringing together the father and the mother, who have been estranged so long by want of tact on one side, confidence on the other, and comprehension on both, is not an easy one to tell, for the misunderstanding which has parted Brooke and Lady Alice is one of those natural misunderstandings that have their origin in character as well as in - circumstance; but Miss Sergeant's solution of the human problem is singularly skilful, and it is worked out quite simply and naturally without that cutting of the tangled knot which is the novelist's general resource. Brooke himself is a finely-con- ceived character. The rough diamond of fiction is wont to ex- hibit his roughness a little too aggressively, and Leslie's father is by no means free from this weakness of his tribe, but the brusque, self-contained, loyal-hearted man is one of the most life-like, as well as one of the most attractive, characters to be found in Miss Sergeant's novels.