Deerbrook

On the first news of the fever being gone, the Greys returned to Deerbrook, and Dr Levitt's family soon followed. The place wore a strange appearance to those who had been absent for some time. Large patches of grass overspread the main street, and cows might have pastured on the thatch of some of the cottages, while the once green churchyard looked brown and bare from the number of new graves crowded in among the old ones.

Arrival, Hope's courtship, Rowland enmity, fever crisis, and restored sunshine form a coherent provincial arc in which epidemic and gossip are plot engines rather than decoration, so plot scores 84.

Mrs Rowland was mortified that the Greys had been beforehand with her in the idea of a cowslip-gathering. From the moment of Matilda's asking leave to accompany them, she resolved to have such an expedition from her house as her neighbours should not be able to eclipse.

Margaret, Hester, Hope, Enderby, and Mrs Rowland are clearly positioned as moral agents in a village rivalry without flattening into allegory only, so cast scores 85.

Mr Hope's case turned out more favourably than any of his attendants and friends had ventured to anticipate. For some days the symptoms continued as alarming as at first; but from the hour that he began to amend, his progress towards recovery was without drawback, and unusually rapid.

Visiting and school-room rivalry dilate the middle; Hope's danger and the fever outbreak supply the novel's real accelerations, so pace scores 82.

Every town-bred person who travels in a rich country region, knows what it is to see a neat white house planted in a pretty situation,—in a shrubbery, or commanding a sunny common, or nestling between two hills,—and to say to himself, as the carriage sweeps past its gate, "I should like to live there,"—"I could be very happy in that pretty place."

Martineau's clear domestic prose — carriage-sweep desire, grass-grown fever street — fuses landscape tenderness with social observation, so prose scores 86.

Large patches of grass overspread the main street, and cows might have pastured on the thatch of some of the cottages, while the once green churchyard looked brown and bare from the number of new graves crowded in among the old ones.

Deerbrook as parish stage — surgery, rival households, fever-emptied street and crowded graves — maps contagion onto moral geography, so world scores 85.

Every town-bred person who travels in a rich country region, knows what it is to see a neat white house planted in a pretty situation,—in a shrubbery, or commanding a sunny common, or nestling between two hills,—and to say to himself, as the carriage sweeps past its gate, "I should like to live there."

The traveler's wish to inhabit the pretty house invites before the sisters arrive — desire before conflict — so hook scores 83.

Within a month, the news circulated through the village, that he had been seen in his garden, and that he had even walked to the end of the shrubbery.

A practicing surgeon as romantic center and epidemic as social test give Martineau's provincial novel a pre-Brontë seriousness of ideas in marriage-comedy dress, so innov scores 84.

Margaret kept Philip waiting while she lighted her friend's lamp; and its gleam shone from the window of the summer-house for long, while, talking of Maria, the lovers paced the shrubbery, and let the twilight go.

Fever gone, lamp lit, lovers in twilight — restorative pastoral after ostracism — morally earned if gently summarized, so ending scores 84.