Sidney Kilner Levett-Yeats - Style

Style

Levett's novels were the equivalent of today's action movies: full of chase scenes, dramatic battles and high-strung melodrama. The gist of Levett-Yeats' Chevalier d'Auriac, said The New York Times, "is the way the King reveals his true manliness and gives over Mme. de Tremouille to the Chevalier, who had wooed her so long and undergone so many dangers on her account." Perhaps more darkly, The Times hinted in its review of such astonishing similarities between Levett's book and that of another popular writer of the day, Stanley J. Weyman, that, it declared, "were it not for the author's name and preface, the average reader would certainly believe (it) to be another work from the facile pen of Mr. Weyman."

For English novelists of the age, India offered a beguiling chance to explore the exotic and the raffish. Levett-Yeats began with tales of the East, before moving on mostly to stories set among the jousters of medieval Europe. "India still remains a favorite hunting-ground of the novelist, and the field of Mr. Kipling and Mrs. Steel is this week re-occupied by Mr. S. Levett-Yeats, who is well-known at the libraries by reason of his successful story, 'The Honour of Savelli,'" said the New York magazine The Critic in 1897. Because of his service as soldier, bureaucrat and traveller on the Indian subcontinent, noted the magazine, "he has therefore had abundant opportunity for observing the things which he describes."