The Crackanthorpe name is not as well known as it should be. The short stories in Wreckage (1893) are a good sharp antidote to the pieties and sentimentalities of Victorian fiction.
There must be hundreds of novels which feature a virtuous, long-suffering heroine, who, however mistreated, turns cheek after cheek until her patience is rewarded with a beau and an unexpected inheritance. Think Jane Eyre.
Here is Hubert Crackanthorpe's version of this archetype:
"A blind desire to silence [Aunt Lisbet], to stamp the life out of her, swept over Lilly. Seizing the parasol, which lay on the kitchen table, with all her strength she Aunt Lisbet across the side of her head.
And over the thought of that blow she lingered, recalling it again and again, repeating it in her mind with a strange, exquisite pleasure. For into it she had put the hatred of years.
Aunt Lisbet uttered a low, plaintive moan -- the curious moan of sudden pain -- and fell, dragging with her on to the floor a pile of plates.
The crash sent every nerve in Lilly's body tingling, but when, a moment later, Aunt Lisbet moved to get up, the blind, murderous desire returned. Another brutal blow of the parasol, and she knocked her back again."
Hubert Crackanthorpe drowned (perhaps accidentally, perhaps taking his own life) at age 26. His fiction is sometimes compared to that of de Maupassant, but I prefer to think of him as the Dostoevsky that England never produced.
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