Theodore Sedgwick Fay was one of the most talented of the Knickerbocker school of writers who pursued a career in literature in the wake of the international success of Washington Irving. His popularity in the late 1820s, due to a facile, pleasant writing style and gentle, wry humor, led New-York Mirror editors George Pope Morris and Nathaniel Parker Willis to offer the twenty-one-year-old Fay coeditor status. In the mid 1830s Fay turned his talents to the novel, producing a best-seller with his first effort, Norman Leslie. A Tale of the Present Times (1835), which was attacked by Edgar Allan Poe in a famous slashing review. The success of Norman Leslie helped Fay win the first of a series of diplomatic appointments in Europe, where he spent the last sixty years of his life.

While he lived on the Continent, Fay published two more novels, including his best one, The...