The Brown Owl

A princess is left with a kingdom, a wicked chancellor and a brown owl who is more than an owl, and must find out which of the men around her is the enchanter. Ford Madox Ford wrote this at seventeen for his sister, and it was his first published book. The fairy-tale machinery is conventional; the prose already is not. Fifty-eight plates of castles, gardens and fairy-tale figures by painters including Edward Burne-Jones and John Atkinson Grimshaw give the story the old romance its young author was reaching for.