L H Myers – författare
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For five hundred years, the Orissers have lived in the cloistered country mansion of Eamor, but when Lilian, young wife of the debt-ridden archaeologist Sir Charles Orisser, is widowed, she turns to wealthy businessman John Mayne for help. His offer of marriage will solve the family''s financial problems, but he will own Eamor. He makes a promise that, on his death, ownership will return to the Orissers, but the marriage is a disaster, and so leaves the question of whether Mayne will keep his word - or how.
The son of FWH Myers (co-founder of the Society for Psychical Research, and author of Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, which LH Myers compiled for publication, and later abridged for a popular edition), Leopold Hamilton Myers (1881-1944) enjoyed a period of critical and popular success as a novelist between the First and Second World Wars.
Born into wealth, Myers nevertheless had a deep belief in the evils of social inequality, and spent a lifetime both rejecting and living within the privileged world of the rich. The Orissers is his examination of the question of how to live in a world ruled by materialistic concerns - as embodied by the grasping businessman John Mayne - but informed by spiritual and artistic values which the Orissers, as a family, hold so dear. His obituary in The Times called it "a powerful and somewhat gloomy story... interesting as an elaborate study of psychological types".
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It''s the height of the Roaring Twenties, and the Clio, probably the most expensive steam-yacht in the world, heads down the Amazon. On board is the widowed Lady Oswestry (whose main concern is to acquire her favourite face-cream, so as not to have awkward wrinkles appear just when she''s fixing her sights on Sir James Annesley), her younger son Hugo (on the verge of entering politics, and wondering which of the young ladies on board he should fall in love with), and her seemingly good-for-nothing but capable-of-anything older son Harry. Along with a number of gentlemen and young ladies, including a doctor, a professor who has studied the wildlife of the area, and the politically astute Stella Barlow, the cruise seems a pleasant chance to see interesting new sights and perhaps fall in love.
But when news arrives that revolution has broken out in the region, it becomes evident Harry didn''t opt for this particular destination on a whim. And when a manoeuvre to avoid a floating mine grounds the Clio, these idle holidaymakers find themselves faced with fever, encounters with deadly wildlife, news of the revolution happening all around them, and the sheer boredom of being grounded, leading them to question just what they are doing with their lives.
By turns comic, dramatic, political and introspective, L H Myers'' second novel is both a criticism of the idle classes who see themselves as separate from a world that is at times in desperate straits, as well as a light comic look at love, hopes, dreams, and the encounter with sometimes awkward realities.