This book begins with a survey of R. F. Delderfield's knowledge of Napoleonic history as revealed in his three Napoleonic-era novels. Two commentaries follow: the first on English attitudes and actions in a London suburb during the Interbellum (1918-1939) in his novels The Dreaming Suburb and The Avenue Goes to War, and the second on his Craddock trilogy, set in Devonshire, dramatizing the English experience from the Boer War until the late 1960s.

Completing the survey begun in Lams' Cornish Trilogy volume, Aspects of Robertson Davies' Novels discusses the Salterton and Deptford trilogies along with Davies' last two novels, Murther & Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man. The apprentice effort Tempest-Tost and the journeyman's success Leaven of Malice were followed by Davies' first genuinely fine novel, A Mixture of Frailties, the story of a talented Salterton girl who becomes a world-famous soprano. The Deptford trilogy is discussed in terms of Northrop Frye's "confession" form as it appears in Fifth Business, and in variations of that form in The Manticore and World of Wonders. Although Davies' Jungian enthusiasms produced certain flaws to which readers have objected, Murther & Walking Spirits is by no means a failure; it is best understood as an implicit spiritual history of Canada which is adumbrated in the generational experience of a single Canadian family. The Cunning Man concludes Davies' career with a narrative as rewardingly complex as any of the Cornish trilogy novels.

The novelist R. F. Delderfield's trilogy of English life in the second half of the nineteenth century portrays the social history of Adam Swann and his family, energetic people of differing talents and tempers involved in a kaleidoscopic range of social engagements. Born into a military family but shaken by his army experience in India, Adam returns to civilian life in England and creates an innovative goods-hauling service across the country. Adam's ten children are also innovators who provide the intellectual activity expressed by the phrase "The Ethos of Britain." In the novels a whole country is energized by a handful of individuals who recognize and set out to solve a wide range of social problems - such as, teenage girls being abducted into continental brothels, miners killed or maimed by underground hazards, factory hands enduring long hours tending unsafe machinery, and elderly couples evicted from their homes, separated, and starved. As Adam's observant wife Henrietta expresses it, wherever there's a problem "you're sure to find a Swann or two." The Swann trilogy dramatizes a half-century of British dominance in Europe prior to the First World War as represented by the members of a single English family.

Focusing upon the arguments Newman uses to define Catholicism against the hostility of English protestants, this book is a reader's guide to the books Newman published soon after his own conversion: Mixed Congregations; Difficulties of Anglicans; Present Position of Catholics, and his two novels. While the arguments advanced in Difficulties of Anglicans and Present Position of Catholics are confrontationally direct, his novels Loss and Gain and Callista respond to the attacks of Elizabeth Harris' From Oxford to Rome and Charles Kingsley's Hypatia by the indirection which typifies Newman's fictional rhetoric.