The Quick or the Dead? a Study

1888. Poet and writer Amelie Rives (pseudonym of Princess Amelie (Rives) Chanler Troubetzkoy) became an immediate literary sensation when she published the passionate, melodramatic novel, The Quick or the Dead? The book begins: There was a soughing rain asweep that night, with no wind to drive it, yet it ceased and fell, sighed and was hushed incessantly, as by some changing gale. Barbara was a good deal unnerved by the lanternless drive from the station. The shelving road, seamed with abrupt gullies, lay through murk fields and stony hollows, that she well remembered; in the glimpsing lightning she saw scurrying trees against the suave autumn sky, like etchings on bluish paper; the dry, white-brown grasses swirled about the horses' feet in that windless rain; and after what thunderous fashion those horses pounded stableward! They hurled through narrow gateways like stones from a catapult, rushed past ragged trees whose boles seemed leaping to meet them, spun over large stones as through they had been mere fallen leaves.