The Great Squire. London: Collins, 1939. First Edition. Pp 432. Spotting to prelminary leaves, lacks the dust jacket. Overall a good copy.

A large-scale historical novel set in late eighteenth-century Ireland, centred on the rise and fall of a reckless Irish landlord.

Published when Stuart was in his late thirties, it is a substantial work of 432 pages and was reviewed favourably on its release for its vivid social panorama and memorable central character. For readers of Stuart today, the novel is of interest as an early major work by a writer later known for the controversial Black List Section H (1971) and for his wartime years in Germany.

The Great Squire belongs to his pre-war phase: a richly populated historical narrative in the nineteenth-century mode, more concerned with character and social texture than with modernist experiment.