Belchamber by Howard Overing Sturgis (1904)

This is a substantial late Victorian-Edwardian story, with many qualities of what used to be called the sensation novel - a frisson of the slightly dark, of the undercurrents beneath polite society. In this instance it is a sexless marriage and the illegitimate offspring born to it. There is nothing particularly unusual about that; what is unusual is that it is Sturgis who is its author. His published novels, now that I've read them all, fill me with suspicion. His first, the classic of hero-worship-bordering-on-homosexuality, Tim, and his second, the obscure and quite inconsequentially quiet All That Was Possible, were novels with forms of spareness in them and yet vastly different from each other. Now comes this fulsome, conservative, rich family tapestry, with echoes of grand tragedy ringing through it. In other words, if I didn't have the title pages to tell me, I would never believe that these three novels were by the same author. Now, the question is: was Sturgis an extraordinary mimic or chameleon? Did he shift perspective most absolutely with each effort, right down to style? Or are some of these books other people's work? If so, whose? His life-companion, William Haynes Smith? Was one or another of them heavily revised by one of his literary friends? Henry James or Edith Wharton? But, at the end of the day, this is a beautiful, sad book, and its main character a movingly flawed man brilliantly portrayed.