Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by Marianne North, John Kelt Edwards and Christopher Williams. The life of a novelist as his friend saw it: years of rejection, a father who despises the work, a girl who waits, and the slow arrival of a reputation. Edna Lyall was Ada Ellen Bayly, a clergyman's daughter who took a near-anagram of her own name and wrote novels that argued — for Irish Home Rule, for women, for freethinkers. This 1889 book is her quietest, and the publishing detail is exact. Fifty-nine plates of painting, from Meissonier and Spitzweg to Welsh scenes by Christopher Williams, mirror the novel's slow making of a writer across 1845 to 1919.