Romance Baring-Gould, Sabine: Cheap Jack Zita. v1. 18 Dec 2021

[GrannyGrump]

A tale of love and intrigue and a family saga. We begin with a lively description of the Cheap Jack peddler and his pretty daughter selling their wares in the cathedral town of Ely. The poor Cheap Jack is very ill, and dies, and Zita is left alone in the world, with the van, goods, and horse. This is the story of the adventures of this independent young woman.

“Mr. Baring-Gould’s latest novel has a full measure of his best qualities— strength, picturesqueness, and unusualness. No other novelist living could have conceived that murderous fight with flails in the beginning of the story, or have painted in such glowing colours that really splendid scene of the burning mill, or brought out with such lurid intensity the full horror of the unhappy Drownlands’s death agony. Cheap Jack Zita is a tale of life in the Fen country early in the [19th] century. … Baring-Gould … has genius for seeing the romantic and unearthly side of nature. And similarly he detects the possibilities of passion and tragedy and self-sacrifice under the most plebeian exteriors. Zita is a delightfully unconventional heroine, thoroughly in keeping with her unconventional surroundings, and indeed, the whole book is of uncommon merit.”
(— contemporary review, The Athenaeum, 09 Dec. 1893)

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The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould (28 January 1834 – 2 January 1924) was an Anglican priest, antiquarian and folklorist, novelist, and eclectic scholar. One of the most prolific and popular writers of the late-Victorian period, he wrote more than 150 books and contributed countless magazine articles. His folkloric studies resulted in The Book of Were-Wolves (1865), one of the most frequently cited studies of lycanthropy; followed by numerous volumes on other arcane subjects. He is remembered particularly as a writer of hymns, the best-known being “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

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This novel was first published in 1893. Cover illustration from painting by James Archer (1823–1904). This ebook is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+90” or less, and in the USA.
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