A story based on the injustice of the English divorce law. Feeling herself unloved and unwanted in her own home, Claire Gilmour marries Roderick Vaughan. She knows nothing of marriage and the feeling of admiration and affection which she had confused with love quickly dies. Roddy is a spendthrift and a brute. He squanders all of Claire’s fortune he can lay his hands on and bullies her into giving him more by threatening to take her child from her. She endures every indignity, but the members of her family, who had disapproved of the marriage, are set absolutely against divorce. Roddy goes to America and Claire learns the meaning of peace. He returns and consents to a divorce, but withdraws his consent when Claire inherits money and brings a counter charge of infidelity against her, quite false but easily proved true in court. Roddy and Claire are both declared unfaithful and hence forced to live in wedlock. Claire takes the one way open and goes away with the man who loves her and whose career has been ruined by the divorce scandal.
“The author who sets out deliberately to write a novel with a purpose must content himself with being a little less than an artist, a little more than a preacher. In ‘A remedy against sin’ Mr W. B. Maxwell has chosen to obscure his talents under a wig and gown that he may deliver a tremendous attack against the monstrous injustice of our present divorce laws. Up to a certain point we must admit that ‘A remedy against sin’ is a great deal better than the majority of novels.” K. M.
+ − Ath p543 Ap 23 ’20 780w
“The end is one that few novelists would have the courage to record, but it is a logical end, although it is not one that readers who seek for a novel with a ‘high moral purpose’ will approve. But since Mr Maxwell is writing the truth about life, he has made convincing the culmination of the tragic tale of the marriage of Roderick Vaughan and Claire Gilmour.” E. F. E.
+ Boston Transcript p4 O 6 ’20 1300w
“One of the strongest pleas ever made against the existing law in England. As a work of art the novel suffers little from the evident propaganda, because of the clearness of characterization, and the gradual working out of an inevitable crisis in an intolerable situation.”
+ Ind 104:384 D 11 ’20 130w
“One thing about this new novel cannot, in view of its subject, be too strongly emphasized, and that one thing is this: it is absolutely clean. Admirable in its construction, sane and realistic in its development, intensely interesting from beginning to end, this new novel by W. B. Maxwell is a thoughtful, conscientious and notable book, a book worthy of the man who wrote ‘In cotton wool’ and ‘Mrs Thompson.’”
+ N Y Times p22 S 26 ’20 1100w