The Beautiful Wretch (Esprios Classics)

William Black (1841-1898) was a novelist born in Glasgow. He was educated with a view to being a landscape painter a training that clearly influenced his literary life and as a writer he became celebrated for the detailed and atmospheric descriptions of landscapes and seascapes in novels such as White Wings: A Yachting Romance (1880). At the age of twenty-three he went to London after some experience in Glasgow journalism and joined the staff of The Morning Star and later the Daily News of which journal he became assistant-editor. He wrote a weekly serial in The Graphic. In the Austro- Prussian War he acted as a war correspondent. His first novel James Merle appeared in 1864 and met with little success.