BOOKSHIP

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”.

“Purely as a literary figure, there are few novelists who make such an excellent impression as Myers... he undoubtedly belongs on the list of major writers of the twentieth century.” — Colin Wilson