A girl of property, brought up to think herself the equal of any man, proposes to a young man in a churchyard and is refused-and the humiliation sets both their lives running. Stoker managed Henry Irving's Lyceum for twenty-seven years and wrote in the hours around it; this 1905 novel is not a horror story at all, and its argument about what women are permitted to want is much more interesting than its reputation. Fifty-eight plates of painting, from Millet's peasants to Tissot's church interiors, give this story of a woman who proposes and a man who refuses the visual world it was written against.
