No one ever loved Graham Greene, though many thought him as fine a novelist as we’ve had these last 50 years. No one ever made a shrine of Erich Segal’s boyhood home, though his 1970 Love Story sold in the millions. Adoration from readers does not belong to authors to command, and neither acknowledged greatness nor demonstrated popularity is quite the same as love. May Sinclair’s mostly forgotten works may have been better written, and Charlotte Yonge’s utterly forgotten novels were certainly more popular in the 19th century, but it is the Orchard House of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women in Concord, Mass., that literary pilgrims continue to visit.

For almost 30 years now, the Irish novelist Patrick O’Brian has been publishing historical tales of Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin fighting the Napoleonic sea-wars. From an almost unnoticed beginning in 1969 with Master and Commander, the series — now in its 18th volume with the publication of The Yellow Admiral (W. W. Norton, 262 pages, $ 24) — has come to receive serious attention and lavish praise from fellow novelists as diverse as Robertson Davies, Mary Renault, A. S. Byatt, and Iris Murdoch.