Love’s Cross-Currents was serialized pseudonymously in The Tatler in 1877 under the title A Year’s Letters, with Swinburne using the pen name “Mrs. Horace Manners.” It was not published in book form under Swinburne’s name until 1905 (by Harper & Brothers). The novel is told entirely through letters exchanged among members of an aristocratic family, and its subject is sexual intrigue, emotional manipulation, and the exercise of power through charm and intelligence.
The central figure is Lady Dolorida Doddos Midhurst — a grandmother of extraordinary intelligence and force of will who manipulates the romantic lives of her grandchildren with cold precision, arranging marriages and breaking attachments according to her own calculations of advantage. She is one of the great manipulators in Victorian fiction: charming, ruthless, entirely conscious of what she does, and sufficiently intelligent to justify it to herself as family duty.
The novel’s epistolary form suits Swinburne’s gifts: his ear for distinctive voices, his understanding of how people conceal truth within language, and his appreciation of the gap between what letters say and what they mean. The various correspondents reveal themselves through their prose styles — some frank, some evasive, some deliberately misleading — creating a complex web of partial information that the reader must interpret.
The novel is a minor work in comparison with Swinburne’s poetry, but it demonstrates that his understanding of human psychology was not limited to the extreme states his verse explores. He could write about ordinary social manipulation with the same precision he brought to ecstatic or agonized passion.
Collecting Love’s Cross-Currents
First book edition (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1905): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First book edition, fine: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40