While this book might not be ‘The Great American Novel’, I think it is a great and enjoyable work of fiction.

Called “…And the Ladies of the Club”, the story revolves around the members of the Waynesboro Women’s Club and their families and friends covering a period from 1868 to 1932.

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I’m going through a period of reading classic novels and the one I’ve just finished is Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. This was first published in 1862 and was a ’sensation’ novel. Although the language is definitely 19th century, it isn’t as wordy as other classic authors like Dickens or Trollope and reads pretty much like a modern detective story.

Right from the start you know that the beautiful Lady Audley is the villain. The questions are:

• How far does her villainy go?
• Will Robert Audley, her husband’s nephew, find enough evidence to unmask her?
• Because Robert’s uncle is besotted with her, what will he do if he does find the evidence as he dreads hurting his uncle?

Robert Audley is an aristocratic young man who trained as a barrister but has never taken a case. He is languid and does not exert himself, even in those sports like hunting and shooting traditionally popular with the upper classes. He meets up with his old friend George Talboys who he hadn’t seen for some years as George had been in Australia prospecting for gold. Because he’d married against his father’s wishes, he’d been cut off without a penny so left his wife and baby to make his fortune.

When he arrives home, he discovers his wife had died and his son is in the care of her drunken father. He mourns his wife bitterly. A year later Robert and George visit Robert’s uncle and his wife. Lady Audley manages to avoid meeting George until the two men are due to go home when George leaves Robert asleep on a riverbank where they had been fishing, and goes to the uncle’s house and meets Lady Audley. He disappears without trace.

Robert Audley quickly becomes convinced that Lady Audley has murdered his friend and sets about gathering the evidence to prove it. To do this, he must show that she is not the person she pretends to be and her past is quite different to the little she had revealed.

We see Robert Audley grow and develop as he mourns his friend and sets out on his quest to bring the culprit to justice.

It is really a quick and easy read and I highly recommend it.

I’ve already written several Squidoo lens (pages) about books and authors. The last one was about The Dark is Rising Sequence, a five volume fantasy series for children by Susan Cooper. I didn’t read it till I was 35 and it’s one of my favourites now. I’m considering doing more lenses about books but can’t decide which ones to do at the moment.

I’d also like to do some ‘How to’ articles, again I’m undecided about the subject.

When I received commissions to write articles for magazines, it was easy. The editor would ask for 2000 words on a particular subject and give me a deadline plus information if he or she wanted a particular angle. I’d research it using the internet and old-fashioned things like books. While I was doing the research, I’d find that the way I’d tackle it would form in my mind so I could sit down and pretty much write it straightaway when I had enough information. I’d leave it for a day, read it again, go through and take out repeated words and phrases, unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, and reword anything that was clumsy. If I had time, I’d leave it another day, read it again and do any polishing that was needed.

I found that my articles were used without any or much sub-editing because I took so much trouble to refine them myself.

The difficulty I have writing online is that I can choose any subject I like. It’s so hard to decide sometimes. I like it when a topic pops into my mind and I desperately want to write about it. My big problem, particularly on Squidoo, is that I’m spoilt for choice.

I’m going through a period of re-reading some of my favourite books at the moment. Currently I’m reading the Complete Father Brown Stories by G.K. Chesterton. They are short stories and gentle mysteries. There are no real clues for the reader to follow, we just have to admire Father Brown’s deduction, mostly based on a knowledge of human nature and psychology.

Next I’m going to read Kim by Rudyard Kipling, a story of a young boy in India who is the orphaned son of a British soldier taken in by an Indian woman. He’s completely assimilated in Indian culture and gets caught up in the ‘Great Game’ of spying between Britain and Russia. I’ve read it a few times and I always find it entrancing. When you read this book, you realise that Kipling was no racist. On the contrary, it is obvious the respect he had for Indians and the culture of India.