Reviews for Property Law

The average rating for Property Law based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-03-23 00:00:00 Adam Mcguire This is a very good 18th century epistolary novel. The prose is precise and elegant, the voices of the various letter writers are well delineated and individualized, and the author makes us admire the heroine and fret over the difficulties which obstruct her happiness. The two lovers—the naive Evelina and the elegant Lord Orville—exhibit sentiment and good sense even in the midst of misunderstandings in a way that looks forward to Austen, and the misunderstandings themselves are both credible and interesting. The novel is, however, not completely successful. Some of the comic characters—Captain Mirvan and Madame Duval, for example—are so crude in conception and so coarse in their behavior that they appear to have traveled here from a very different novel, making the charming Evelina sometimes look like a Disney princess surrounded by escapees from a Warner Brothers’ Looney Tune. These zanies soon take a back seat, however, and the novel resolves itself in a way that is both harmonious and satisfying. ("Evelina" is clearly within the tradition of the "sentimental" novel. Characters are continually commenting on the delicacy of sensibility that may serve to distinguish the superior person from the ordinary one. It is easy to make fun of this literary fashion, but some of the events in the novel--I'm thinking of the abduction, terrorizing and humiliation of the middle-aged Mme. Duval as a practical joke and the wager of two respectable noblemen on a race between two infirm old ladies--are treated in such a cavalier fashion by even this well-bred young female author that I have become convinced that eighteenth century society desperately needed the sentimental impulse--and its embodiment in popular fiction--as a civilizing force.)

Review # 2 was written on 2019-05-21 00:00:00 Scott Bedell Good primary sources for a basic history.