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A Terrible Temptation

First published: 1871
Pages: 390

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About this book

A sensational Victorian novel of intrigue, wrongful confinement, and hidden identity, in which schemes over inheritance and reputation ensnare its characters in danger and injustice. Charles Reade, a popular and campaigning novelist known for exposing social abuses, combines melodrama, suspense, and a reformer's outrage—here touching on the scandal of private asylums used to imprison the sane. Fast-moving and gripping, the novel delivers the twists and moral indignation that made his fiction hugely popular. A representative work from a best-selling Victorian author, A Terrible Temptation blends page-turning sensation with sharp social criticism in the tradition of the great reform-minded novelists.

About the author

Charles Reade

Charles Reade was a Victorian novelist and dramatist who built fiction from documentary research, theatrical practice, and contemporary social disputes. Masks and faces began as an 1852 comedy written with Tom Taylor and centered on the eighteenth-century actor Peg Woffington; Reade later reshaped its material into the novel Peg Woffington.