Yorkshire Echoes
Yorkshire Echoes is an article published in The Yorkshire Evening Post on 16 november 1893.
Article
The matter of Dr. Conan Doyle's lecture in Leeds, last night, was better than the manner. Mr. Doyle is a fine, tall, broad-shouldered man, with a voice deep and strong, but rather unmanage able. His style of delivery was ponderous and slow; there was a little difficulty about his "tr's" which slightly suggested a lisp. He is not, as I say, a fascinating lecturer, but his subject was interesting, and was exploited with freshness and vigour. Only I should take exception to the title, "Facts about Fiction." There were no facts to speak of, Mr. Doyle simply gave us a critical opinion and comparison of modern fictionists and their work.
It was typical of the man that he should show a generous and unstinted appreciation of Robert Louis Stevenson, George Meredith, J. M. Barrie, and some of the exponents of the New Humour, saying that in these modern writers' hands the best tradi- tions of English literature were safe. Most noticeable, perhaps, was Mr. Conan Doyle's lavish praise of Olive Schreiner. He lauded "The Story of an African Farm" as a masterpiece of literature, and one of the two really great works written in this century by women. The other book, it is interesting to state, was in Mr. Doyle's opinion Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights."
