The Gateless Barrier

by Lucas Malet

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Pages: 138

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About this book

An Atlantic crossing gives Laurence Rivers time to question the comfortable life he has built among fashionable society in New York and Newport. Called to England by his uncle's final illness, he expects to inherit the family property at Stoke Rivers. His reflections on marriage, ambition and unused talent establish a man who feels that social success has left something essential in him unfulfilled.

Lucas Malet brings this private dissatisfaction into a ghost story with a love story at its centre. In a brightly lit drawing room, Laurence longs for another meeting with a mysterious woman whose presence has stirred his affections and his curiosity about life beyond death. A miniature of an earlier Laurence Rivers deepens his unease. The novel offers readers a close study of desire, responsibility and spiritual uncertainty, with the supernatural pressing against the duties of an ordinary marriage.

About the author

Lucas Malet

Lucas Malet (1852-1931) was the pen name of Mary St Leger Kingsley, an English novelist and daughter of Charles Kingsley. Admired and controversial, she wrote frank, ambitious fiction that pushed against Victorian conventions.