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Amazon.com
Ian McEwan’s Booker Prize-nominated Atonement is his first novel since Amsterdam took home the prize in 1998. But while Amsterdam was a slim, sleek piece, Atonement is a more sturdy, more ambitious work, allowing McEwan more room to play, think, and experiment. We meet 13-year-old Briony Tallis in the summer of 1935, as she attempts to stage a production of her new drama “The Trials of Arabella” to welcome home her older, idolized brother Leon. But she soon discovers that her cousins, the glamorous Lola and the twin boys Jackson and Pierrot, aren’t up to the task, and directorial ambitions are abandoned as more interesting prospects of preoccupation come onto the scene. The charlady’s son, Robbie Turner, appears to be forcing Briony’s sister Cecilia to strip in the fountain and sends her obscene letters; Leon has brought home a dim chocolate magnate keen for a war to promote his new “Army Ammo” chocolate bar; and upstairs, Briony’s migraine-stricken mother Emily keeps tabs on the house from her bed. Soon, secrets emerge that change the lives of everyone present….
The interwar, upper-middle-class setting of the book’s long, masterfully sustained opening section might recall Virginia Woolf or Henry Green, but as we move forward–eventually to the turn of the 21st century–the novel’s central concerns emerge, and McEwan’s voice becomes clear, even personal. For at heart, Atonement is about the pleasures, pains, and dangers of writing, and perhaps even more, about the challenge of controlling what readers make of your writing. McEwan shouldn’t have any doubts about readers of Atonement: this is a thoughtful, provocative, and at times moving book that will have readers applauding. –Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
This haunting novel, which just failed to win the Booker this year, is at once McEwan at his most closely observed and psychologically penetrating, and his most sweeping and expansive. It is in effect two, or even three, books in one, all masterfully crafted. The first part ushers us into a domestic crisis that becomes a crime story centered around an event that changes the lives of half a dozen people in an upper-middle-class country home on a hot English summer’s day in 1935. Young Briony Tallis, a hyperimaginative 13-year-old who sees her older sister, Cecilia, mysteriously involved with their neighbor Robbie Turner, a fellow Cambridge student subsidized by the Tallis family, points a finger at Robbie when her young cousin is assaulted in the grounds that night; on her testimony alone, Robbie is jailed. The second part of the book moves forward five years to focus on Robbie, now freed and part of the British Army that was cornered and eventually evacuated by a fleet of small boats at Dunkirk during the early days of WWII. This is an astonishingly imagined fresco that bares the full anguish of what Britain in later years came to see as a kind of victory. In the third part, Briony becomes a nurse amid wonderfully observed scenes of London as the nation mobilizes. No, she doesn’t have Robbie as a patient, but she begins to come to terms with what she has done and offers to make amends to him and Cecilia, now together as lovers. In an ironic epilogue that is yet another coup de the tre, McEwan offers Briony as an elderly novelist today, revisiting her past in fact and fancy and contributing a moving windup to the sustained flight of a deeply novelistic imagination. With each book McEwan ranges wider, and his powers have never been more fully in evidence than here. Author tour. (Mar. 19)Forecast: McEwan’s work has been building a strong literary readership, and the brilliantly evoked prewar and wartime scenes here should extend that; expect strong results from handselling to the faithful. The cover photo of a stately English home nicely establishes the novel’s atmosphere
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
–This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Set during the seemingly idyllic summer of 1935 at the country estate of the Tallis family, the first section of this thought-provoking novel ambles through one scorchingly hot day that changes the lives of almost everyone present. The catalyst is overly imaginative 13-year-old Briony, who accuses Robbie, her sister’s childhood friend and their housemaid’s son, of raping her cousin Lola. The young man is sent to prison and Cecilia, heartbroken, abandons her family and becomes a nursing sister in London. In the second part, McEwan vividly describes another single day, this time Robbie’s experiences during the ignominious British retreat to Dunkirk early in World War II. Finally, readers meet Briony again, now a nursing student. She is aware that she might have been wrong that day five years earlier and begins to seek atonement, having clearly ruined two lives. In a story within a story, McEwan brilliantly engages readers in a tour de force of what ifs and might have beens until they begin to wonder what actually happened. The story is compelling, the characters well drawn and engaging, and the outcome is almost always in doubt. The descriptions of the retreat and the subsequent hospitalization of the soldiers are grim and realistic. Readers are spared little, yet the journey is worth the observed pain and distress. Well-read teens will find much to think about in this novel.
Susan H. Woodcock, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
The major events of Booker Prize winner McEwan’s new novel occur one day in the summer of 1935. Briony Tallis, a precocious 13-year-old with an overactive imagination, witnesses an incident between Cecilia, her older sister, and Robbie Turner, son of the Tallis family’s charwoman. Already startled by the sexual overtones of what she has seen, she is completely shocked that evening when she surreptitiously reads a suggestive note Robbie has mistakenly sent Cecilia. It then becomes easy for her to believe that the shadowy figure who assaults her cousin Lola late that night is Robbie. Briony’s testimony sends Robbie to prison and, through an early release, into the army on the eve of World War II. Gradually understanding what she has done, Briony seeks atonement first through a career in nursing and then through writing, with the novel itself framed as a literary confession it has taken her a lifetime to write. Moving deftly between styles, this is a compelling exploration of guilt and the struggle for forgiveness. Recommended for most public libraries.
- Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From AudioFile
Thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis and her older sister, Cecelia, have been fortunate to grow up in a prosperous English manor home. On a hot summer day in 1935, a single event moves Briony to take steps that will alter the entire household’s lives forever. British actress Josephine Bailey is an elegant and exacting performer who never trips over long passages of resplendent adjectives and meandering descriptions. As the story moves the characters forward to Dunkirk in 1941 and then to a final reunion in the late 1990s, Bailey provides a graceful, provocative, and stimulating performance. B.J.P. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine– Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
McEwan, a master of psychologically acute and elegantly gothic tales, won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam (1998) and now weighs in with an even more polished and entrancing novel. It’s 1935, and England is experiencing a heat wave, while chaos rules at the Tallis country estate. Mr. Tallis is always at the office; his lovely wife, suffering from migraines, is usually in her darkened bedroom. Their youngest, 13-year-old Briony, a budding writer, keeps busy composing silly romances while waiting for her visiting older siblings and displaced cousins. Brother Leon, a bank clerk, arrives with an unattractive but wealthy friend. Sister Cecilia is home after finishing up at Cambridge, as is the sharp and ambitious Robbie Turner, their cleaning lady’s son. The cousins, freckly twin boys and the newly nubile and wholly untrustworthy Lola, are unhappy victims of an impending divorce. All are hoping for a soothing holiday, but things quickly turn bizarrely catastrophic thanks to the highly imaginative but utterly naive and histrionic Briony, who sees something sinister occur between Cecilia and Robbie and wildly overreacts. McEwan’s instantly addictive story line is of the bad-to-worse variety as he moves on to the harrowing vicissitudes of World War II. Every lustrously rendered, commanding scene is charged with both despair and diabolical wit, and McEwan’s Jamesian prose covers the emotional spectrum from searing eroticism to toxic guilt. In sum, he excels brilliantly at depicting moral dilemmas and stressed minds in action without losing a keen sense of the body’s terrible fragility, the touching absurdity of desire, and time’s obstinacy. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
“A tour de force…. Every bit as affecting as it is gripping.”
—The New York Times
“Lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama.” —John Updike, The New Yorker
“Luminous…. Atonement is brilliant.”
—Newsweek
“No one now writing fiction in the English language surpasses Ian McEwan.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“McEwan could be the most psychologically astute writer working today, our era’s Jane Austen.”
—Esquire
Review
“McEwan’s Atonement?truly dazzles, proving to be as much about the art and morality of writing as it is about the past?. The middle section of Atonement, the two vividly realized set pieces of Robbie’s trek to the Channel and Briony’s experiences with the wounded evacuees of Dunkirk, would alone have made an outstanding novel?. There is wonderful writing throughout as McEwan weaves his many themes — the accidents of contingency, the sins of absent fathers, class oppression — into his narrative, and in a magical love scene.” — Brian Bethune, Maclean?s
“?Atonement is a deliriously great read, but more than that it is a great book.? There are characters you follow with breathless anxiety; a plot worthy of a top-drawer suspense novelist, complete with jolting reversals; language that unspools seemingly effortlessly, yet leaves a minefield of still-to-be-detonated nouns and verbs?. rife with?unforgettable tableaux?.” — The Globe and Mail
?What a joy it is to read a book that shocks one into remembering just how high one’s literary standards should be.? a tour de force by one of England’s best novelists?. Atonement is a spectacular book; as good a novel — and more satisfying?– than anything McEwan has written?.sublimely written narrative?. The Dunkirk passage is a stupendous piece of writing, a set piece that could easily stand on its own.? ? — Noah Richler, National Post
?I can?t imagine many readers who won?t find it compelling from beginning to end?. McEwan has dealt with major themes before in his novels, but never at this length and with this narrative richness. With Atonement he has staked a convincing claim to be the finest of all that brilliantly talented crew of British novelists, including Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis and Graham Swift, who rose to prominence in the 1980s.? — Phillip Marchand, The Toronto Star
?Atonement has power and stature and is compulsively readable.? — The Gazette (Montreal)
?It is difficult to imagine how the book might be bettered. Bold in its intentions and flawlessly executed, Atonement is one of the rare novels to strike a balance between ?old-fashioned? storytelling and a postmodern exploration of the process of literary creation. Atonement is a tremendous achievement, a rich demonstration of McEwan?s gifts as a storyteller.? — The Vancouver Sun
?Ian McEwan?s writing is so vivid it can make your eyes ache. But you can?t look less closely or put the book down. Such is McEwan?s growing strength. Atonement is exacting and poetic in detail as well as generous with wry, often heart-rending insight. Each character is richly portrayed and fully realized, from their subtlest thoughts and motivations to their period dress and surroundings. Atonement sustains, rewards and surprises right up to its final page.? — Victoria Times-Colonist
?With a clear prose style and a humming sense of tension throughout, Atonement is both illuminating and entertaining. McEwan believes in love and goodness, but he is far more interested in good?s contrary, whether it is evil or mere psychological weakness. There may be atonement for the past, but there is never redemption.? — The Edmonton Journal
?Class conflict, war and the responsibilities of the artist are among the themes of Atonement, but it is Ian McEwan?s writing that makes this novel one of his best: lush and langorous in the long first section, understated and precise in the latter two.? — The Ottawa Citizen
??a classic McEwan performance, combining an intense forward narrative thrust with the sharpness of observation and description that has made him this country?s unrivalled literary giant.? — The Independent (U.K.)
“Atonement [is] McEwan’s best novel, so far, his masterpiece?. Atonement is…a meditation on the impulse of storytelling itself, on the wish to give shape to experience which deceives no less than it illuminates.” — Evening Standard (U.K.)
“The close-up verdict will be simple enough: Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence; as searching an account of error, shame and reparation as any in modern fiction?. The bigger picture would have to set it within the long sweep of a literary canon. With a lordly self-consciousness, McEwan here blends his own climate into the weather-pattern of classic English fiction. Atonement is not a modest work; but then (to distort Churchill on Attlee), it has an awful lot to be immodest about.” — The Independent (U.K.)
Book Description
On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions Atonement follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.
Inside Flap Copy
From the Booker Prize winning author of Amsterdam, a brilliant new novel.
On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, son of the Tallis?s cleaning lady, whose education has been subsidized by Cecilia?s and Briony?s father, and who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By day’s end, their lives will be changed ? irrevocably. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not imagined at its start. And Briony will have witnessed mysteries, seen an unspeakable word, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone?
Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of love and war and class and childhood and England, An Atonement is a profound ? and profoundly moving ? exploration of shame and forgiveness, of atonement and of the possibility of absolution. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From the Back Cover
“A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama.” –John Updike, The New Yorker
“Flat-out brilliant. . . . Lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“A tour de force. . . . Every bit as affecting as it is gripping.” –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Luminous. . . . Atonement is brilliant and like nothing he’s ever written before.” –Newsweek
“No one now writing fiction in the English language surpasses Ian McEwan.” –The Washington Post Book World
“Brilliant. . . . McEwan could be the most psychologically astute writer working today, our era’s Jane Austen.” –Esquire
“A work of astonishing depth and humanity.” –The Economist
“His most complete and passionate book to date.” –The New York Times Book Review
“In the seriousness of its intentions and the dazzle of its language, Atonement made me starry-eyed all over again on behalf of literature’s humanizing possibilities.” –Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times
“Resplendent. . . . Graceful. . . . Magisterial. . . . Gloriously realized.” –The Boston Sunday Globe
“McEwan is technically at the height of his powers.” –The New York Review of Books
“Astonishing. . . . [with] one of the most remarkable erotic scenes in modern fiction. . . . [It] is something you will never forget.” –Chicago Tribune
“Enthralling. . . . With psychological insight and a command of sensual and historical detail, Mr. McEwan creates an absorbing fictional world.” –The Wall Street Journal
“[Atonement] hauls a defining part of the British literary tradition up to and into the 21st century.” –The Guardian
“Astonishing. . . . Gorgeous. . . . Bewitching. . . . A thought-provoking, luxuriant novel.” –Minneapolis Star Tribune
“McEwan is one of the most gifted literary storytellers alive. . . . [Atonement] implants in the memory a living, flaming presence.” –James Wood, The New Republic
“[McEwan’s] best novel so far. . . . It will break your heart.” –The Star (Toronto)
“A masterpiece of moral inquiry. . . . Beautiful and wrenching.” –New York
“A first-rate novel on any scale. . . . His most expansive and ambitious book. . . . Few, if any, novelists writing today match McEwan in ingenuity and plotting.” –Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Magnificent. . . . McEwan forces his readers to turn the pages with greater dread and anticipation than does perhaps any other ‘literary’ writer working in English today.” –Claire Messud, The Atlantic Monthly
“The extraordinary range of Atonement suggests that there’s nothing McEwan can’t do.” –The Christian Science Monitor
“Magically readable. . . . Never has McEwan shown himself to be more in sympathy with the vulnerability of the human heart.” –Sunday Times (London)
“Magnificent. . . . Suspenseful, psychologically astute and intellectually bracing.” –Newsday
“Not since the 19th century has a writer stepped in and out of his characters’ minds with such unfettered confidence.” –The Plain Dealer
“A novel of artistry, power and truth that puts it among the most extraordinary works of fiction of the last decade. . . . It is, quite simply, magnificent–a masterpiece.” –Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun
“Magical. . . . A love story, a war story, and a story about stories, and so it hits the heart, the guts and the brain.” –The New York Observer
“Luminous. . . . McEwan’s writing has often made me blink, but never before blink with emotion. . . . [McEwan] is at one with his talent.” –Robert Cremins, Houston Chronicle
“Atonement can’t be laid down once it’s been picked up. . . . [McEwan] can write rings around most others writing in English today.” –The Weekly Standard
–This text refers to the Paperback edition.
About the Author
Ian McEwan is the bestselling author of more than ten books, including Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize. He lives in London.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One
The play–for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper–was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch. When the preparations were complete, she had nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft and wait for the appearance of her cousins from the distant north. There would be time for only one day of rehearsal before her brother arrived. At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed. The reckless passion of the heroine, Arabella, for a wicked foreign count is punished by ill fortune when she contracts cholera during an impetuous dash toward a seaside town with her intended. Deserted by him and nearly everybody else, bed-bound in a garret, she discovers in herself a sense of humor. Fortune presents her a second chance in the form of an impoverished doctor–in fact, a prince in disguise who has elected to work among the needy. Healed by him, Arabella chooses judiciously this time, and is rewarded by reconciliation with her family and a wedding with the medical prince on “a windy sunlit day in spring.”
Mrs. Tallis read the seven pages of The Trials of Arabella in her bedroom, at her dressing table, with the author’s arm around her shoulder the whole while. Briony studied her mother’s face for every trace of shifting emotion, and Emily Tallis obliged with looks of alarm, snickers of glee and, at the end, grateful smiles and wise, affirming nods. She took her daughter in her arms, onto her lap–ah, that hot smooth little body she remembered from its infancy, and still not gone from her, not quite yet–and said that the play was “stupendous,” and agreed instantly, murmuring into the tight whorl of the girl’s ear, that this word could be quoted on the poster which was to be on an easel in the entrance hall by the ticket booth.
Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project’s highest point of fulfillment. Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration. There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, when she burrowed in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, and made her heart thud with luminous, yearning fantasies, little playlets in themselves, every one of which featured Leon. In one, his big, good-natured face buckled in grief as Arabella sank in loneliness and despair. In another, there he was, cocktail in hand at some fashionable city watering hole, overheard boasting to a group of friends: Yes, my younger sister, Briony Tallis the writer, you must surely have heard of her. In a third, he punched the air in exultation as the final curtain fell, although there was no curtain, there was no possibility of a curtain. Her play was not for her cousins, it was for her brother, to celebrate his return, provoke his admiration and guide him away from his careless succession of girlfriends, toward the right form of wife, the one who would persuade him to return to the countryside, the one who would sweetly request Briony’s services as a bridesmaid.
She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. Whereas her big sister’s room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Briony’s was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model farm spread across a deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way–toward their owner–as if about to break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled. In fact, Briony’s was the only tidy upstairs room in the house. Her straight-backed dolls in their many-roomed mansion appeared to be under strict instructions not to touch the walls; the various thumb-sized figures to be found standing about her dressing table–cowboys, deep-sea divers, humanoid mice–suggested by their even ranks and spacing a citizen’s army awaiting orders.
A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for secrets: in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool’s gold, a rainmaking spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel’s skull as light as a leaf.
But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found.
At the age of eleven she wrote her first story–a foolish affair, imitative of half a dozen folktales and lacking, she realized later, that vital knowingness about the ways of the world which compels a reader’s respect. But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character’s weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? Only when a story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world, could she feel immune, and ready to punch holes in the margins, bind the chapters with pieces of string, paint or draw the cover, and take the finished work to show to her mother, or her father, when he was home.
Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were “esoteric,” a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in “shameless auto-exculpation,” the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a “cursory” journey through the night, the king’s furrowed brow was the “hieroglyph” of his displeasure. Briony was encouraged to read her stories aloud in the library and it surprised her parents and older sister to hear their quiet girl perform so boldly, making big gestures with her free arm, arching her eyebrows as she did the voices, and looking up from the page for seconds at a time as she read in order to gaze into one face after the other, unapologetically demanding her family’s total attention as she cast her narrative spell.
Even without their attention and praise and obvious pleasure, Briony could not have been held back from her writing. In any case, she was discovering, as had many writers before her, that not all recognition is helpful. Cecilia’s enthusiasm, for example, seemed a little overstated, tainted with condescension perhaps, and intrusive too; her big sister wanted each bound story catalogued and placed on the library shelves, between Rabindranath Tagore and Quintus Tertullian. If this was supposed to be a joke, Briony ignored it. She was on course now, and had found satisfaction on other levels; writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturization. A world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm. The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word–a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be made just so. A crisis in a heroine’s life could be made to coincide with hailstones, gales and thunder, whereas nuptials were generally blessed with good light and soft breezes. A love of order also shaped the principles of justice, with death and marriage the main engines of housekeeping, the former being set aside exclusively for the morally dubious, the latter a reward withheld until the final page.
The play she had written for Leon’s homecoming was her first excursion into drama, and she had found the transition quite effortless. It was a relief not to be writing out the she saids, or describing the weather or the onset of spring or her heroine’s face–beauty, she had discovered, occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the other hand, had infinite variation. A universe reduced to what was said in it was tidiness indeed, almost to the point of nullity, and to compensate, every utterance was delivered at the extremity of some feeling or other, in the service of which the exclamation mark was indispensable. The Trials of Arabella may have been a melodrama, but its author had yet to hear the ter…
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