The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (1891)

This is a really elegant and typical late-Victorian novel. It has the expectable richness of description and breadth of incident; it has the social divisions and indeed comedy; it has the discursive spread. I would lay some emphasis on the elegance. The style is poetically backboned whilst being comfortingly familiar, and has the tonal depth that presents the reader with the feeling of dramatic immersion. Her faults are here, too. She has a tendency toward the hothouse - a feeling of dramatic twisting to serve plot which is, of course, not unfamiliar, and oddly quite re-assuring, but still disserves the highest ambition. Her novels seem to me to be alternating. The first and third are slightly more ascetic, a little quieter and shorter, whereas the second and this one are greater, more spreading pieces that capture a whole group in their society and exigencies. But after all that, whatever it is that draws them together is stronger than that which separates them. The identifiably notable Malet style and the world it creates is rich and enveloping: so much so that characters are beginning to re-appear from the previous novels in subsequent ones - her fictional notion was clearly an all-embracing one. Henry James thought very highly of her; she is certainly a deeply satisfying, rounded tale-teller.