I have recently been fortunate in securing a copy of that very rare and precious novel Delina Delaney, by Amanda M. Ros, authoress of Irene Iddesleigh and Poems of Puncture. Mrs. Ros’s name is only known to a small and select band of readers. But by these few she is highly prized; one of her readers, it is said, actually was at the pains to make a complete manuscript copy of Delina Delaney, so great was his admiration and so hopelessly out of print the book. Let me recommend the volume, Mrs. Ros’s masterpiece, to the attention of enterprising publishers. Delina Delaney opens with a tremendous, an almost, in its richness of vituperative eloquence, Rabelaisian denunciation of Mr. Barry Pain, who had, it seems, treated Irene Iddesleigh with scant respect in his review of the novel in Black and White. “This so-called Barry Pain, by name, has taken upon himself to criticize a work, the depth of which fails to reach the solving power of his borrowed, and, he’d have you believe, varied talent.” But “I care not for 130the opinion of half-starved upstarts, who don the garb of a shabby-genteel, and fain would feed the mind of the people with the worthless scraps of stolen fancies.” So perish all reviewers! And now for Delina herself.
The story is a simple one. Delina Delaney, daughter of a fisherman, loves and is loved by Lord Gifford. The baleful influence of a dark-haired Frenchwoman, Madame de Maine, daughter of the Count-av-Nevo, comes between the lovers and their happiness, and Delina undergoes fearful torments, including three years’ penal servitude, before their union can take place. It is the manner, rather than the matter, of the book which is remarkable. Here, for instance, is a fine conversation between Lord Gifford and his mother, an aristocratic dame who strenuously objects to his connection with Delina. Returning one day to Columba Castle she hears an unpleasant piece of news: her son has been seen kissing Delina in the conservatory.
“Home again, mother?” he boldly uttered, as he gazed reverently in her face.
“Home to Hades!” returned the raging high-bred daughter of distinguished effeminacy.
“Ah me! what is the matter?” meekly inquired his lordship.
“Everything is the matter with a broken-hearted 131mother of low-minded offspring,” she answered hotly.... “Henry Edward Ludlow Gifford, son of my strength, idolized remnant of my inert husband, who at this moment invisibly offers the scourging whip of fatherly authority to your backbone of resentment (though for years you think him dead to your movements) and pillar of maternal trust.”
Poor Lady Gifford! her son’s behaviour was her undoing. The shock caused her to lose first her reason and then her life. Her son was heart-broken at the thought that he was responsible for her downfall:
“Is it true, O Death,” I cried in my agony, “that you have wrested from me my mother, Lady Gifford of Columba Castle, and left me here, a unit figuring on the great blackboard of the past, the shaky surface of the present and fickle field of the future to track my life-steps, with gross indifference to her wished-for wish?”... Blind she lay to the presence of her son, who charged her death-gun with the powder of accelerated wrath.
It is impossible to suppose that Mrs. Ros can ever have read Euphues or the earlier romances of Robert Greene. How then shall we account for the extraordinary resemblance to Euphuism of her style? how explain those rich alliterations, those elaborate “kennings” and circumlocutions of which the fabric of her book is woven? Take away from Lyly 132his erudition and his passion for antithesis, and you have Mrs. Ros. Delina is own sister to Euphues and Pandosto. The fact is that Mrs. Ros happens, though separated from Euphuism by three hundred years and more, to have arrived independently at precisely the same stage of development as Lyly and his disciples. It is possible to see in a growing child a picture in miniature of all the phases through which humanity has passed in its devel............