From One Generation to Another

A young officer in the Mutiny reads in the newspaper that he has been killed, and decides to let the mistake stand — it frees him from a fiancée in England and leaves him clear for a richer bride. Nineteen years later the deed is answered. Merriman wrote spare, unsentimental novels of intrigue at a time when the fashion ran the other way, and refused to have his photograph published. Sixty plates of reading, letter-writing and quiet interiors by painters such as James Tissot and Vilhelm Hammershøi give the novel's world of secrets and mistaken news its visual key.