+ N Y Times 25:164 Ap 11 ’20 650w
BORDEN-TURNER, MARY. Romantic woman. *$2 (1½c) Knopf
20–15390
The story of a Chicago heiress who marries into the British aristocracy. It opens in Chicago, here lightly disguised as “Iroquois,” with the heroine’s own account of her democratic and rather hoydenish girlhood and an introduction to the childhood friends, Louise, Phyllis, Jim Van Orden and Pat O’Brien, who play a part in her later life. Perhaps she should have married Jim and settled down to a conventional and comfortable American life, but traveling with her father in India she falls romantically in love with a handsome cavalry officer, not knowing that he is heir to a dukedom. He, on his part, tho genuinely attracted to the girl, is not unconscious of her wealth. Marriage brings disillusionments and introduces the naïve American into a society whose standards are quite incomprehensible. There is considerable analysis of the two contrasting points of view and the story ends with a glimpse of the war.
“If you can find either constructive idea or positive personality in this book, I cannot; and therefore it remains for me, despite its clever elaboration of detail, that thing which Mr Hewlett rightly dismisses as not worth the name—a string of anecdotes, and no more.” H. W. Boynton
− Bookm 52:71 S ’20 560w
“Her picture of that city [Chicago] and its people is one of the very brilliant things in recent literature. Its temper is not harsh, but it has an edge and the edge cuts clean every time. Always she conveys the richness, the distinction, and the vigor of an arresting character and mind.”
+ Nation 110:625 My 8 ’20 900w
“Miss Borden is not a little pretentious. She does not avoid trying to take more soul out than she has really put in. At the same time, she has a rich theme and she knows her theme. She has a real Englishman in hand and she knows him; and she has a vitality almost as good as the vitality of art. Hers is not the detachment of art or the sincerity of artistic self-expression. It is the drive of emotion, the sincerity of a personal confession told in provisional terms.” F. H.