A Bride of a Summer’s Day

Catherine Louisa Pirkis wrote this novel during the busiest stretch of her career, in the 1880s, well before she created the pioneering woman detective Loveday Brooke. Like much of her longer fiction, it belongs to the popular tradition of sensation and domestic romance that filled the circulating libraries of the period, turning on questions of love, marriage, secrets, and reputation among the English middle and upper classes. Pirkis wrote for a wide readership rather than for the critics, and her storytelling has the pace and emotional pull that kept Victorian audiences turning pages. This edition preserves a lesser-known work by an author now valued for her place in the history of detective fiction. Free PDF and EPUB edition.