"I have often wished that I could write a novel in which, as mostly in life, thank goodness, nothing happens," wrote Maurice Hewlett near the end of a literary career devoted to the intrigues of medieval romance and swashbuckling historical drama. He had just finished reading with approval one of Dorothy Richardson's experimental "mental process" fictions. Hewlett, who wrote nothing but legal briefs until age thirty, was a reluctant, if prolific, novelist. "The truth is," he explained, "I write everything and approach everything as a poet--history, psychology, romance, novels, everything. It was by an accident, and an unfortunate one for me, that I was tempted to write prose." The critical and popular success of his first novel, The Forest Lovers (1898), had condemned him, he thought, to turning out "potboiling fancies imbued with pothouse realism" in order to satisfy the expectations of his readers. Although Hewlett's published work is...