Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

Faith and Unfaith, a Novel Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

It is a large, old-fashioned, stately apartment, oak-paneled, with large mullioned windows, and a massive marble chimney-piece that reaches high as a man's head. A pleasant, sociable room at ordinary times, but now impregnated with the vague gloom that hangs over all the house and seeks even here to check the gaudy brightness of the sun that, rushing in, tries to illuminate it. At the sideboard stands Simon Gale, the butler and oldest domestic of Hythe, who has lived with the dead lord as man and boy, and now regrets him with a grief more strongly resembling the sorrowing of one for a friend than for a master. Margaret Wolfe Hungerford was an Irish novelist whose light romantic fiction was popular throughout the English-speaking world in the late 19th century. Her books were first published anonymously and later by "Mrs. Hungerford". In the United States, her books were mostly published under the pen name "The Duchess". Her books continued selling as fast as she could write them. Hungerford's plots follow the usual conventions of romantic novels of the day. They contain delicate love scenes that were never offensive to the ideals of Victorian morals. Her works are characterized as entertaining and charming. She was adept at capturing the tone of her contemporary fashionable society. The novel Molly Bawn, 1878, contains her most famous idiom..."Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"