Aleko

the long version

*Aleko* is a novel about an English teacher at a prestigious Greek boarding school who falls deeply (and disastrously) in love with one of his pupils. This long-forgotten gem earned favorable reviews on release: "Quite beautifully told, in glimpses and episodes: the colour of land and sea, the feel of sun and shade, seem to get into Mr. Matthew's prose." -- Gerald Gould, *The Observer*. "Mr. Matthews has written a sincere and lovely book...warm and alive, bathed in the sunlight of a Grecian spring. It is a book to anger a good many people, but there are more, I fancy, who will fall under the spell of its charm." -- John Beevers, *The Daily Dispatch*. "We are all androgynous, and in the infinite variations of the degree of the male and female characteristics in us, there is the possibility, as between any two people of the same sex, for infinite degrees of what is crudely known as homosexuality or lesbianism. *Aleko* is a description, done with a great deal of psychological competence and lyrical feeling, of one state or stage in that infinity of gradation." -- Herbert Read, *The Spectator*.