Search -
A Pixy in Petticoats (Valancourt Classics)
A Pixy in Petticoats - Valancourt Classics Author:John Trevena, Ernest George Henham "'A Pixy in Petticoats' is as good a story of Dartmoor as has been written these many moons."-Evening Standard. "A glance at any chapter is almost as good as a breath of that breeze which charges at you on the top of Hay or Yes Tor."-Bystander. "The story is built up with quite exceptional skill. The writing is consistently brilliant."-Liverpool... more » Courier. "A romance of many merits."-Express. Ernest George Henham (b.1870) first began publishing occult fiction in the 1890s, but when his health began to fail, doctors recommended the salutary air of Dartmoor. Taking their advice, he relocated from London to Devonshire, where he abjured his former literary productions and reinvented himself under the name of "John Trevena." A Pixy in Petticoats, published anonymously by Alston Rivers of London in 1906, remained one of Trevena's most popular novels, although he is perhaps better known today for his trilogy of life upon Dartmoor comprising Furze the Cruel (1907), Heather (1908), and Granite (1909). In Pixy, a fictionalized rendition of Trevena named Burrough takes up residence in Dartmoor, where, consumptive, and approaching thirty-five, he believes his days of romance are long behind him. That is, at least, until he meets the bewitching Beatrice Pentreath, herself a beguiling pixy like the ones that co-existed with Cornish men and women dating back to before the time of her ancestor, Dolly Pentreath, the last native speaker of Cornish. Burrough falls madly in love with the coy Beatrice, but when a military accident leaves him disfigured, he questions whether he can ever win her love. The story of the relationship between these two lovers, by turns comic and light-hearted and devestatingly tragic, forms the plot of A Pixy in Petticoats, which, like many of Trevena's novels, remains as enchanting and haunting as when first published, and which, as Prof. Gerald Monsman argues in his introduction, deserves reconsideration alongside the novels of Thomas Hardy as a crucial English regional novel of the Edwardian period.« less