The Passionate Elopement

Set in an elegant eighteenth-century English spa town, Compton MacKenzie’s debut novel traces a delicate, ill-fated romance amid the rituals, gossip, and artifice of fashionable Georgian society. Written in polished, mannered prose that mirrors its powdered-and-perfumed world, it is a jewel-like period piece of love and social nicety. MacKenzie, who would become a celebrated and prolific author, announced his gifts here with wit and stylistic grace. A charming, bittersweet miniature of manners and feeling, it evokes a vanished age with affection and irony.