A Lodge in the Wilderness

David Daniell, in The Interpreter's House (1975), called the work "an extraordinary book, like nothing else". It is mostly serious discussion, but there is also a lot of fun especially in the portrait of Lady Flora Brume, based upon the real-life Susan Grosvenor who was later to become Buchan's wife.^[3]

Writing for The John Buchan Society website in 2002, Edwin Lee noted that while the book has some aspects of a novel it is not a novel in the ordinary sense of the word. Rather, he suggested, Buchan is using the imagined conference, via the utterances of his characters, as a means of defending the ideals and practical benefits of Empire.^[2]

In his 2009 essay John Buchan and the South African War Michael Redley noted that the book drew on Buchan's South African experiences. The author's intention "was to rescue [Lord] Milner's best ideas from the wreckage of his South African policy when British politics lurched to the left in January 1906".^[4]

Andrew Lownie, in his 2013 biography John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier, suggested that while the attitudes appearing in the book may appear patronising to a late 20th-century reader, Buchan “shows himself to be far in advance of many of his contemporaries with his view of the empowerment of the individual and the Empire as a liberalising force for good”.^[5]

• A Lodge in the Wilderness at Faded Page (Canada)
• A Lodge in the Wilderness at Project Gutenberg Australia