The Passionate Elopement

Compton MacKenzie’s first novel is a costume piece set in Curtain Wells, an invented eighteenth-century spa town where fashionable idlers gather to take the waters, gossip, and fall in and out of love. At its center is a courtship threatened by rivalries, misread signals, and the elaborate manners of the age, all leading toward the runaway match the title promises. MacKenzie writes with obvious relish for period detail, powdered wigs and candlelit assembly rooms, and a mannered, faintly mocking humor that keeps the sentiment from tipping over. It reads less like history than like a fond pastiche of it, a minor but charming debut from a writer who would go on to bigger things. Now offered as a free PDF and EPUB edition.