My Lady Caprice

A man courts a young woman by way of her small nephew, who conducts the campaign for him with rather more energy than tact — a summer, a river, a garden and an entirely successful conspiracy. Farnol painted scenery in New York theatres and wrote his first novel on scraps between shifts, after a Birmingham foundry sacked him for fighting; this is his lightest book, and the boys are drawn without a grain of sugar. Fifty-nine plates of gardens, rivers and young ladies in boats, from Sargent and Tissot among others, follow the courtship's own scenery across a century and more of painting.