Page:The Mystery of the Sea.djvu/521



The Pall Mall Gazette.—'Mrs. Steel's latest wonderful romance of Indian life. It is '57 in little, and in our own day. Mrs. Steel has again subtly and keenly shown us how unique is her power of realising the unstably poised, the troubled half-and-half mind that is the key to the Indian problem.'

The Daily Chronicle.—'No one, not even the Kipling of an earlier day, quite does for India what Mrs. Steel does; she sees Indian life steadily, and sees it whole with a vision that is truthful, sympathetic. Such is the wealth of her observation that her page is rich with colour as an Eastern bazaar, and fragrant as a basket of quinces.'

The Times.—'It is the native mind which Mrs. Steel shows us as no other writer has done. She sketches in the native scenes with intimate detail, with ease in obtaining her effects.'

Black and White.—'Mrs. Steel works on a crowded canvas, yet every figure stands out distinctly. Voices in the Night is a book to be read carefully. It is a book to be kept and to be read more than once. It is a novel of the best kind, and deserves the attention of the readers who find nothing praiseworthy in the effusions of the popular successes.'

 The Spectator.—'We have read Mrs. Steel's book with ever-increasing surprise and admiration—surprise at her insight into people with whom she can scarcely have been intimate, admiration for the genius which has enabled her to realise that wonderful welter of the East and West, which Delhi must have presented just before the Mutiny. There is many an officer who would give his sword to write military history as Mrs. Steel has written the history of the rising, the siege, and the storm. It is the most wonderful picture. We know that none who lived through the Mutiny will lay the book down without a gasp of admiration, and believe that the same emotion will be felt by thousands to whom the scenes depicted are but lurid phantasmagoria.'

The Daily Chronicle.—'A picture, glowing with colour, of the most momentous and dramatic events in all our Empire's later history. We have read many stories having for their setting the lurid background of the Indian Mutiny, but none that for fidelity to fact, for vivacity of imagination, for masterly breadth of treatment, comes within half a dozen places of this.'