The Quest of the Gilt-Edged Girl by Richard de Lyrienne
Pseudonym of David Hodge and George M. Matheson (no biographical data found)
This 1897 novella is a burlesque of Richard Le Gallienne’s popular
Quest of the Golden Girl, also published by John Lane earlier that same year.
Our narrator, a conceited and self-involved poet, informs us:
It has long been my idea to go in quest of something or other that would be productive of copy. It was in a strange musty document found in my rooms the night before last that I first heard of the Gilt-edged Girl. She is anonymous, and the pleasant-sounding name is my own invention. £30,000, that is the fortune; and the strawberry-mark is on her left shoulder. A Quest involves a pilgrimage of some kind or other, and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and R. L. Stevenson’s With a Donkey in the Cevennes contain many useful wrinkles as to how to write the thing up. And Ménie Muriel Dowie, who “discovered” the Carpathians; I can learn something from her.
As the tale wends its merry way, it also parodies and twits numerous contemporary authors (many of whom contributed to the ‘“Yellow Book” magazine), including Max Beerbohm, Grant Allen, Rudyard Kipling, “Carrie Morelli” (Marie Corelli), James Barrie, and others.
Text was obtained from archive.org. OCR errors were corrected; punctuation, diacritics, and italics formatted. Text is assumed to be in the public domain.
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