Published: St James's Gazette, Supplement, 21 November 1889.

Attribution: RK to Edmonia Hill, 8–16 November 1889 (Letters, i, 360): ‘My notion of the literary tale for the Jimmy [St James's Gazette] still hot and disposed myself unto a complete day. Began at ten, stopped for lunch at two and went on till five weaving the yarn of a young man who started in a literary career in London and wrote himself out in the desire to accumulate money. He used and reused his incidents all over again till the public sickened of him and he married a rich wife just in the nick of time.’ The story perhaps reflects RK's own anxiety: a few weeks before writing ‘The Comet of a Season’ he wrote that ‘I did not come to England to write myself out at first starting – not by a very long sight.’ The fear soon passed and never recurred.

Text: St James's Gazette.

Notes: RK wrote against this title in Chandler's Summary the words ‘not mine RK’, but this was some forty years after the fact. RK denied several items in the bibliographies that he marked that are known to be his by clear evidence, most of them from his very early work.

‘The Comet of a Season’ has been reprinted in the Martindell–Ballard pamphlets and in Harbord, v, 2395–401.

Mr. Ralph Etheredge was a young writer, and it occurred to him to write a book about a woman who had her throat cut and a horse drowned while crossing a ford. You would never suppose that these incidents and a little ink comprised in themselves the elements of glory. That is because you do not know the great British public. People had been suffering from a surfeit of shuddering kisses, or Pyramids, or purple heather, or dialects, or something indigestible, and demanded change of food. They found what they wanted in Mr. Etheredge's book, and they told him so.