Dainty’s Cruel Rivals; or, The Fatal Birthday by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller

Description

The great age of the dime novel threw up no more accomplished technician than Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller, and this 1898 production shows the formula at full power: a heroine of perfect, unassuming enchantment, surrounded by rivals whose cruelty is measured and persistent. Dainty is fresh from the graduate room and into a world of invitations, relatives and secrets, none of which are exactly what they pretend to be.

The birthday that gives the book its subtitle is the engine of its plot, a date circled in the calendars of her enemies and guarded by the young attorneys of her fortune. Miller arranges her scenes with a vaudevillian’s timing, cliffhanger into cliffhanger, poison into elopement, teardrop into rescue, keeping the reader’s sympathy scorched and the pages turning. The excess is the pleasure; nobody in the 1890s did more with less and called it everything.

For connoisseurs of the old sensation

• A heroine whose beauty is her armor and her problem simultaneously.
• Villains who plot in chapter after chapter with operatic efficiency.
• Dime-novel plotting at its dexterous, shameless peak.

About This DodaBooks Edition

The complete 40 chapters are reset in clean, continuous type with a working index.