Jerome. By Annabel Gray. 3 vols. (Sonnenschein and Co.)— Miss
Annabel Gray has produced a novel of the old-fashioned Laura-Matilda type, in which ludicrously unreal characters are presented to us by means of descriptions and conversations peppered with incongruous adjectives, surprising adverbs, and enigmatical metaphors. Jerome is written largely in unknown tongues that boast of such words as bourgois and hertzen, but mainly, of course, in some- thing which purports to be English, but which is not easily recog- nisable as such by those who are acquainted only with the ordinary literary and colloquial forms of that language. From internal evidence alone, we should suppose the book to be the work of some utterly inexperienced writer; but as the title-page gives the names of some half-dozen previous works, this hypothetical explanation of its utter crudity is obviously untenable. What Miss Annabel Gray's other novels may be like, we do not know; but we do know that Jerome is terribly poor stuff.
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