DANE, CLEMENCE. Legend. *$1.60 (4c) Macmillan
20–817
A short novel, occupied wholly with a two hour’s conversation. A woman of genius has died, and her friends, members of the literary circle of which she had made one, are discussing her and her life story, piecing it together and puzzling out the motives that had led her to abandon her art at its height, to marry a humdrum country doctor, and retire into domesticity. Bit by bit they piece together the legend—the legend that is to live for the public in Anita Serle’s “Life.” And bit by bit the reader of the book tears it apart and comes to see the real Madala Grey, as she is known to the two present who had loved her, and to the young country girl who had never seen her, and who tells the story.
“To our thinking the real problem of ‘Legend’ is why Miss Clemence Dane, turning aside from life, should have concentrated her remarkable powers upon reviving, redressing, touching up, bringing up-to-date these puppets of a bygone fashion.” K. M.
− + Ath p1289 D 5 ’19 1350w
“Very well done, but will never find many readers.”
+ Booklist 16:243 Ap ’20
“The book has its faults. Clemence Dane, as in her earlier novel, writes with an almost personal vindictiveness against one of her sex. In her dissection she is as merciless as Anita herself. Her pen drops venom and as the result Anita becomes too cruel in her mental indecencies and just fails to convince.” M. E. Bailey
+ − Bookm 51:202 Ap ’20 1300w