British Quarterly Review (1869): “Bears throughout the mark of Mr. Christie Murray’s genius. Full of subtle touches, which tell not only of extended observation and experience, but of imaginative tact and sympathy and graceful movements of intelligence.” A Bit of Human Nature first appeared in The Graphic Christmas number. It tells the story of a Chinese entertainer given shelter by an English aristocrat and the romantic adventure that follows. The Lively Fanny is a light comedy, concentrating on an Irish adventurer and his two loves, both named Fanny.]]> British Quarterly Review (1882): “We read on and on (noting improbabilities, yet finding that the writer’s art is such as to explain them away or to lessen them somehow in the light of later events) . . .” This is another of Gibbon’s romantic Scottish tales, again dealing with the conflict between social class expectations.]]> Harper’s New Monthly Magazine: “It presents many phases of life, from that of a London physician and his class to that of men engaged in opening up Southern Africa through diamond-digging . . .”]]> Antonina, or The Fall of Rome, this is a historical romance set in 5th century Rome, ruled by the emperor Honorius. The heroine is a beautiful Roman maiden, a Christian, who captures the heart of the Gothic chieftain Hermanric. Hermanric is killed, and Antonia survives a number of dramatic and perilous situations, including being offered up as a virgin sacrifice to Serapis.]]> ]]> Antonina, and “A Story of Modern Life.” Basil is high-born but falls in love with a linen-draper’s daughter, with whom he contracts a secret marriage. She is subsequently seduced by her father’s clerk, and Basil discovers them in a sordid hotel with walls so thin that he can hear them copulating (horrifying Collins’s contemporaries). In the resulting fight the seducer is thrown onto a newly macadamized road and horribly disfigured. The unfaithful wife dies of typhus and remorse. Later the rivals meet in Cornwall, and the seducer is thrown into a boiling sea.]]> ]]> ]]> Times (1893): “Mrs. Riddell never goes to extremes in painting her characters . . .” This plot focusses on a conventional, haunted house, and is often cited as one of Mrs. Riddell’s successful ghost stories.]]>