I haven’t finished Somehow Good yet, but — well, as absorbing as I’m finding it, I’ve been reading it on and off for a couple of weeks now, and I’m still less than halfway through. I’m not convinced that I ever will finish it.
Until I came across this book in the Project Gutenberg catalog, my main associations with the name “William De Morgan” were ceramics and this painting by his wife Evelyn, which I loathe. I had no idea that, around the turn of the century, he began a successful career as a novelist.
Somehow Good is a difficult book to define. The plot, in almost anyone else’s hands, would be unforgivably melodramatic — the New York Times reviewer (PDF) says “the plot of it might well in other hands have served to furnish forth all the thrills that melodrama is made of.”
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Redeeming Qualities 
