7–38430.
A full biography of Major Stearns who was “the Sir Galahad of the antislavery struggle.” It has been compiled partly from documentary evidence and partly from family traditions. It furnishes interesting sidelights on the civil war and its issues.
Steel, Flora Annie. [Sovereign remedy.] †$1.50. Doubleday.
6–26482.
“Two young men, a clerk from a Midland city and an uncomfortable millionaire ... meet a beautiful girl, who has been brought up by a philosophic grandfather in seclusion.... Both fall in love with her, and she falls in love with the millionaire, Lord Blackborough, but, being afraid of love, she marries the other, for whom she has only a humdrum liking. Lord Blackborough continues to make ducks and drakes of his fortune, while the other, Cruttenden, becomes the hard commercial money-spinner. Aura, his wife, is at first fascinated by domesticity, but she is soon repelled by the heartlessness of prosperity, and begins to turn to her first love. She is killed accidentally in his company, and he, too, mad with grief, dies in the ward of a workhouse infirmary with the words of Eastern mysticism on his lips.”—Spec.
| + − | Acad. 71: 182. Ag. 25, ’06. 680w. |
“Is essentially a good story, witty and poignant, and full of interesting modern people; but it is almost intolerably sad.”
| + − | Ath. 1906, 2: 181. Ag. 18. 550w. |
“The chief fault to be found with ... ‘The sovereign remedy,’ is that, out of a rather confusing number of characters, it seems impossible to determine which one she herself was personally interested in, and which she meant the reader to regard as the leading parts. This confusion mars what would otherwise have been a book of considerable strength.” Frederic Taber Cooper.