A Devotee: An Episode in the Life of a Butterfly

by Mary Cholmondeley

Excerpt:
Her delicate features were too irregular, in spite of their obvious high breeding; her figure was too slight; her complexion was too faintly tinted for regular beauty. But she had something of the evanescent charm of a four-petalled dog-rose newly blown—exquisite, ethereal, but as if it might fall in a moment. This aspect of fragility was heightened by what women noticed about her first, namely, her gossamer gown with its silver gleam, and by what men noticed about her first—her gray eyes, pathetic, eager, shy by turns, always lovely, but hinting of a sword too sharp for its slender sheath, of an ardent spirit whose grasp on this world was too slight.

236 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1897

About the author

Mary Cholmondeley was an English novelist.

The daughter of the vicar at St Luke's Church in the village of Hodnet, Market Drayton, Shropshire, England, where she was born, Cholmondeley spent much of the first thirty years of her life taking care of her sickly mother.

Selected writings
* The Danvers Jewels (1886)
* Sir Charles Danvers (1889)
* Let Loose (1890)
* Diana Tempest (1893)
* Devotee: An Episode in the Life of a Butterfly (1897)
* Red Pottage (1899)
* Prisoners (1906)
* The Lowest Rung (1908)
* Moth and Rust (1912)
* After All (1913)
* Notwithstanding (1913)
* Under One Roof (1917)

Reviews

[C.J. Hill · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you enjoy Middlemarch, then this one is its inferior cousin: same ideas but lesser writing.