The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (play) reception was enthusiastic, critical reception was mixed. Frank Rich in "New York Times" reported dull passages piling up as "dead weight", while John Simon in the "New York Magazine" felt that the work was a "middlebrow enterprise" doing "scant justice" to the novel. In contrast Mel Gussow, again in "The New York Times", noted that ""Nicholas Nickleby" remains true to Dickens – many of the lines are taken directly from the novel, dialogue as well as narration – and to first principles of theater" when describing the RSC's recast production in 1986. Playwright and reviewer Thomas Hischak, writing in retrospect
The Two Sisters (novel) The Two Sisters (novel) The Two Sisters was the first novel published by English author H. E. Bates in 1926. It was his first novel, though he had published a one-act play "The Last Bread" earlier that year.The book was inspired by one of his midnight walks, which took him to the small village of Farndish in Bedfordshire. There, late at night, he saw a light burning in a cottage window and it was this that triggered the story. It was written when Bates was only 19 living in Rushden and working as a warehouse clerk. It was rejected by