Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, Butler’s novel about the fortunes of the Pontifex family is a thinly veiled account of his own upbringing and a scathingly funny depiction of the hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life. George Bernard Shaw hailed the novel as “one of the summits of human achievement” and William Maxwell claimed that it was the one Victorian novel he would save if his house caught on fire.