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:
“Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“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)