Cornelius by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (1903)

The unavoidable excellence of Pasture is her colour and clarity. This novel follows its three adult predecessors in being astonishingly lucid and brightly clear. She is a classic purveyor of what can be seen as typical Victorian and Edwardian schemes involving love, marriage, money and inheritance. Of course, what was Austen about other than these things?; this ur-story is much older. But where others of her era have shadows of their age across them, or spurts of greater or lesser definition, Pasture is a core storyteller in every inch of her bone. I can't help but feel that were she to receive a BBC adaptation, or a reading on Book at Bedtime, or whatever other popular-exposure method, her thirteen adult novels would find a very ready audience were they to be republished. In this Welsh Borders-set piece, the eponymous main character has a decision to make when it is discovered that he may be heir to a huge fortune. The real main characters are his affianced and her sister, orphaned returnees from a Belgian school, one a soft considerate beauty, the other a fierier artistic thinker. Their somewhat stifling family includes a ripely snobbish nervous aunt and a much more down to earth truth-talking one, a supremely wealthy and mother-coddled cantankerous ugly cousin as well as a smooth-talking ultimately generous good-looking one. The supporting cast are just as lively and ultra-delineated. The question of the fortune is disposed of in an honourable denouement - and the reader's pleasure in a satisfying story is almost physically palpable.