Rachel Ray

First published in 1863, this novel is set in a Devon village split between church and chapel. Rachel Ray lives with her timid widowed mother and a severe evangelical sister. Luke Rowan, a young man with a claim on a local brewery, courts Rachel against gossip, a hostile newspaper, and the brewery partners who want him gone. Comfortable households, a rural election of feeling rather than of Parliament, and the question of whether beer-making is respectable work supply the conflict. The book is a small-scale courtship novel, not a political panorama and not one of Trollope's Barset or Palliser sequences.

Quarter green cloth series binding, grey-green paper boards with the border in green. Grey-green endleaves. Grey-green slipcase.