Tragic Mansions, by Mrs. Philip Lydig (1927) (opens in new tab)

“I have it on the word of an astute psychoanalyst that Mrs. Philip Lydig is a creature from an antique world,” Harvey O’Higgins, credited by some as its ghostwriter, writes in the introduction to Tragic Mansions. That antique world could have been the Rome of Suetonius or the Restoration England of John Aubrey, for this book bears more in common with their collections of illustrative lives than it does with anything from its time. Indeed, at times, it reads as if a scribe from a longago time ...