Mercy! What's this? A gibbet! and ugh, two skeletons thereon! Oh Denys, what a sorry sight to woo by!" "Nay, said Denys, "a comfortable sight; for every rogue i' the air there is one the less a-foot." Based on a few lines by the humanist Erasmus about the life of his parents, the novel began as a serial in Once a Week magazine in 1859 under the title " A Good Fight", but when Reade disagreed with the proprietors of the magazine over some of the subject matter (principally the unmarried pregnancy of the heroine), he curtailed the serialisation with a false happy ending. Reade continued to work on the novel and published it in 1861, thoroughly revised and extended, as The Cloister and the Hearth.

The following is an incomplete list of words that I looked up during my reading of The Cloister and the Hearth: Opening Chapter 1: Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows. Of these obscure heroes, philosophers, and martyrs, the greater part will never be known till that hour, when many that are great shall be small, and the small great; but of others the world's knowledge may be said to sleep: their lives and characters lie hidden from nations in the annals that record them. The general reader cannot feel them, they are presented so curtly and coldly: they are not like breathing stories appealing to his heart, but little historic hail-stones striking him but to glance off his bosom: nor can he understand them; for epitomes are not narratives, as skeletons are not human figures.novel by Charles Reade 1893 poster by Edward Penfield advertising a US edition of The Cloister & the Hearth It is said that speech is the familiar vent of human thoughts, but Life is an intermittent fever, and there are emotions so simple and overpowering that they rush out not in words, but eloquent sounds. In the longer journey of it, there are days that come by with passions and perils, by fits and starts, and as it were, in clusters. And yes, I would candidly confess, this novel also made me sob single-mindedly. It is indeed a glorious book, it has all, all in all together, and especially vivid unforgettable adventures, marvellous occurrences, that can hardly be ever dismissed from human’s fancy :) I am surely one of his greatest fans now!

This pads out the book at the expense of any pacing, but perhaps this is as well, as there is not a lot of story to begin with. It is hard not to feel frustrated that the two lovers seem to spend decades before meeting up when a journey across Europe should not have taken more than a few months. This is achieved by the piling up of unlikely events designed to detain or deter Gerard from completing his travels.

In the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, there is a document list of Doyle's 18 favourite things. When asked who his favourite heroine in fiction was, he replied, "Margaret" in Cloister and Hearth. [2] past the middle of the fifteenth century; Louis XI was sovereign of France; Edward IV was wrongful king of England; and Philip "the Good," having by force and cunning dispossessed his cousin Jacqueline, and broken her heart, reigned undisturbed this many years in Holland, where our tale begins.