(Warning: This review contains spoilers for both The Lovely Ship and The Voyage Home.)

This concluding volume in Storm Jameson's "Triumph Of Time" trilogy leaps forward from the late Victorian era of The Voyage Home to the rapid change and confusion of the late Edwardian period and the horrors of World War I. Mary Hervey herself, however, though by now in her seventies, is much as we left her at the end of The Voyage Home: domineering, obstinate, and self-willed. Yet the intervening years have taken their toll on Mary. Her most beloved son, Richard Roxby, who slipped from her grasp to undertake "a five-year journey", died before its conclusion, leaving behind a Spanish-American widow and a daughter, Maria. Meanwhile, though Mary will not let herself see it, Hugh Hervey's heath is failing; while the estrangement between Mary and her favourite daughter, Sylvia, begun with Sylvia's rash marriage and set in stone when, in response to her mother swallowing her pride and making the first move of reconciliation, Sylvia slammed the door in her face, continues into the next generation, with Mary's rejection of Sylvia's children. All Mary's hopes for the future, and in particular her hopes for her shipyards and steelworks, now centre in her grandson, Nicholas Roxby, the only son of her scorned second daughter, Clara, who Mary thrusts aside without compunction as she tries to mold Nicholas to her own purposes.

The narrative of A Richer Dust is a a divided one, split between Mary, whose sheer force of will allows her to ignore old age and hold at bay a world she barely understands, and Nicholas, whose own confusion of purpose reflects the growing chaos across Europe. An early, abortive love affair with Maria Roxby, who contracts a wealthy marriage even while making declarations of eternal love to Nicholas, prepares the reader for his subsequent, disastrous marriage to Jenny Ling, one marked by the near-masochism with which he tolerates his wife's evasions and deceit. The war, when it comes, is an escape and a refuge for Nicholas, who finds new clarity and strength in its demands, and who, like his uncle before him, sets quietly but unswervingly about the task of freeing himself from the spectre of Garton's and the weight of Mary Hervey's expectations.

As a whole, the "Triumph Of Time" trilogy offers a vivid account of a rapidly changing world, and of a woman who both defies it and exemplifies it. Its strength lies equally in Storm Jameson's grasp of the middle- and working-class Yorkshire setting of her story, and the very distance this milieu puts between this particular series and the bulk of historical novels set in the same time period. The point is made that Mary Hervey is entirely a product of a particular time and place, and that it is as much a coincidence of circumstances as her own indomitable will that allows her to sieze her opportunity and build an empire. Yet as we know, empires have a habit of falling. While we must admire Mary Hervey's dedication and courage, and her ability to withstand the many blows that life aims at her, her wilful stubborness and her conviction that she has the right to control the lives of others make her difficult to like; and it becomes hard not to feel that, in the repeated thwarting of her ambitions, she is only getting what she deserves. But even the final, shattering blow of Nicholas's defection is not enough to defeat Mary Hervey, of whom it might be justly said that nothing in her running of Garton's Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Works Limited becomes her so well as the leaving of it...