Elsie Lindtner’s method of effacing herself for the second time was to quit her desert island, and take a Cook’s tour round the world with Jeanne.
Thus it happens that we renew acquaintance with her breaking the bank at Monte Carlo in the first pages of this book to which she has given her own name, though it might just as appropriately have been entitled “More Dangerous Age Reflections.” For here, again, the “transition” is the absorbing topic of Elsie Lindtner’s thoughts and correspondence; one might almost say it is “the bee in her bonnet.” Even when she has emerged triumphantly, as she boasts afterwards, from its perils, and has found a new source of interest and happiness in the street arab whom she has adopted, she seems unable to keep the subject out of her conversation and letters. She goes so far as to warn strangers of the “stealthy footsteps of the approaching years,” and disputes with her dear friend, the extraordinary widow, Magna Wellmann, which of them came through those years, “when we are all more or less mad,” with the greatest éclat.
In “Elsie Lindtner” we miss the mise en scène of the White Villa on the island, with its forest and lake, for when Elsie re-visits it with Kelly, it hardly seems the same place, with no Torp and no gardener.... We miss, too, the first, fine, careless rapture of feminine revolt which characterises “The Dangerous Age,” and the Jeanne of these pages is not so vivid as the Jeanne of the former book. In compensation we have more of Magna, and we have Lili Rothe’s love-letters—which were addressed but never sent to the man she loved. Also, as in the previous volume, we have Elsie Lindtner’s letters, with their strange, pathetic eloquence, marvellously revealing a woman’s complicated soul. Their literary merit and their value as a picture of life cannot fail to impress all readers.
Beatrice Marshall.
ELSIE LINDTNER