‘DON JUAN. (NOT BY LORD BYRON.)’
MEDINA POMAR, Duke de.
Fashion and Passion or, Life in Mayfair … by the Duke de Pomar… Author of “The Honeymoon” and “Through the Ages.” A new Edition.
London: Chapman & Hall … 1877.
8vo., pp. vi, 474; occasional foxing but a good copy untrimmed in contemporary deep-red fine-ribbed cloth, elaborately decorated in black; joints rubbed, spine ends and corners bumped.
Added to your basket:
Fashion and Passion or, Life in Mayfair … by the Duke de Pomar… Author of “The Honeymoon” and “Through the Ages.” A new Edition.
Second edition (first published in 1876) of this wildly-popular novel of London society, published after the first edition sold out in two months. It follows the fortunes of the beautiful Señorita Consuelo and her lover Alfredo, who meet on a small-trader passage from Bilbao to London. Consuelo’s beauty and charisma see her drawn into various melodramatic circumstances before the plot’s eventual resolution.
What Fashion and Passion lacks in originality it makes up for in a lively descriptive style and good-humoured acknowledgement that it apes many of the tropes of popular fiction. The chapter titles are taken from other novels and include ‘Pride and Prejudice (Not by Miss Austen.)’, ‘The Woman in White (Not by Wilkie Collins.)’ and ‘Far from the madding Crowd. (Not by Thomas Hardy.)’.
Medina Pomar revealed much about the novel’s contemporary critical reception in the preface to his novel Who is she? of the same year. In a spirited defence he claims that ‘no novel ever met with so much abuse at the hands of reviewers’, but that their cruelty did him a service: ‘every copy of the first edition was sold almost as soon as it was announced; and even my most intimate friends could not get a copy, for love or money, within two months of its publication – so that a new edition became immediately necessary.’ He ruminates on the irony that nothing buoys a novel’s readership as much as a bad review.
