Novels
Levett-Yeats set his boisterous novels in wildly different locales, and his novels struck a chord with an English audience enamoured of historical romance. The genre was so popular that it was known as the 'cloak and sword school.' The Lord Protector, for instance, set in the days of the English Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, describes the hunting down of an ardent Royalist. A Galahad of the Creeks was set during the Burmese wars. The Chevalier d'Auriac concerned Henry of Navarre. Other tales were set in swashbuckling Europe. Orrain: A Romance, published by Methuen in London and by Longmans in the United States, told a tale of King Henry II of France and his wife Catherine de Medici. The Chevalier d'Auriac was serialized in Longman's Magazine in 1897.
Levett's best-known book was The Honour of Savelli, a tale of treachery and intrigue set during the era of the Borgias in medieval Italy. The work, noted a review in the magazine Book Reviews, captured Levett's strong suit: his storytelling ability. "The freedom and dash of his recital, and the general ability shown in the handling of his characters and in the quality of his style are his strongest credentials," noted the review.
Read more about this topic: Sidney Kilner Levett-Yeats
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“But then in novels the most indifferent hero comes out right at last. Some god comes out of a theatrical cloud and leaves the poor devil ten thousand-a-year and a title.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programmes, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)