“The author’s bias in favour of republicanism is unfortunate in its results upon his work.... It is useless, however, to discuss differences of opinion in a book the subject of which is so immense; we can only repeat our conviction that a reader who expects to find a general book on the art, literature and history of all the Italian states during their most important period will find Mr Cotterill’s book useful, though he will be well advised to supplement its judgments with other and more detailed works, and to make free use of the historical lists and tables provided at the end of the book, and of the useful index.”
+ − Sat R 128:561 D 13 ’19 1050w
COUPERUS, LOUIS MARIE ANNE. Inevitable; tr. by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. *$2 (2c) Dodd
20–18761
The title of the story indicates its fatalism. At the age of twenty-three Cornélie de Retz van Loo was a divorced woman. She had passionately loved the handsome Baron Brox when she married him, but their temperaments had clashed from the beginning. He had gone so far in his masterful, brutal way, as to beat her and she had run away. She went to Italy to be alone and to reconstruct her life. She became a feminist and achieved some fame in the woman movement by her pamphlet on “The social position of divorced women.” Also she met Duco van der Staal, the painter and dreamer and formed a free union. They were a most harmonious couple, complementing and stimulating each other; helping each other to find their “line of life.” But Cornélie will not hear of marriage. She is through with marriage. Impecuniosity enjoins a temporary separation. Cornélie takes a position as companion. There she meets her former husband who at once exerts hypnotic power over her and commands her to return to him. Cornélie flees and returns to Duco, but even in his arms and knowing that she loves only him, her inexorable fate is upon her. She follows the call of him whom she does not love, but whose property and chattel she is because she was once his wife.
“Of the four other Couperus novels which have now been published in this country, ‘The inevitable’ is decidedly the best from the mere standpoint of novel writing.” D. L. M.
+ Boston Transcript p4 N 6 ’20 1250w
“Taken as a whole, it is rich in beauty, rich in passion, has much of gentle dreaming and superb awakening; yet it contains a certain sadness which oftimes borders close to melancholy—a splendid woof woven together with a warp of morbidity.” M. D. Walker
+ N Y Call p5 Ja 9 ’21 1050w