Joan Delamere, of English parentage, was born in the tropics and had an exotic temperament. She was a musical genius, imaginative and romantic to a degree. She dreamt dreams and fashioned them in music. While still a child the personality of a certain Lord Oswald Lancaster fired her imagination and became her hero. Chance encounters with him at long intervals kept the fire burning, but not till the hero was sixty and Joan thirty did they come to know and love each other. As a child she had made a vow never to marry and her union with Lord Oswald remained an illicit one. When an older obligation claimed the latter, Joan hid herself from him and the world on her native Seychelles islands where she died a lonely death in giving birth to her son.
“The book is not quite as compact as the theme demands, and this diffuseness militates a bit against its complete success but in a large measure the theme, in its ample treatment, is developed in a surprisingly interesting manner. The reader will find much to satisfy him in the book by considering Joan as a feat in portraiture.”
+ − N Y Times p26 Ag 22 ’20 780w
“As usual with this author, we are attracted, half in our own despite, by the sheer cleverness often revealed in dialogue, characterisation and description.”
+ − Sat R 130:100 Jl 31 ’20 240w
“Her sentimental adventures are not completely convincing, and Lord Oswald Lancaster is of so commonplace and unattractive a type that the reader will have very little sympathy with Joan Delamere’s obsession.”
− Spec 125:216 Ag 14 ’20 50w
“The events of the tale are plausible, and the persons behave quite naturally and credibly. To that extent the book is a skilful and successful piece of fiction. Yet it is very far indeed from being a good novel in any more serious sense than that. The reason is that the persons, though carefully imitated from life, are only lay figures. They are the product not of an act of creative imagination, but of skilled and painstaking manufacture.”
+ − The Times [London] Lit Sup p426 Jl 1 ’20 360w