Daisy's Necklace

A young author hands his manuscript to a critic friend — a sentimental tale of a house by the sea, little Bell waiting for a father who never comes home, and Daisy, whose necklace leads to an arrest — and the book is at once the romance and its own burlesque, the author breaking in to mock the fashionable fiction of 1857 and the reviewers waiting for it. Aldrich wrote it at twenty, years before he edited the Atlantic Monthly, and enjoyed himself. Fifty-seven plates of painting, from Munch to Bierstadt, carry the sea light and shore weather that Aldrich's young romance both borrows and mocks.