Hutten, Baroness von. He and Hecuba. [†]$1.50. Appleton.
A poor English rector who is atoning for the passionate past by faithful service to his flock at the expense of himself, his invalid wife, and his neglected children, meets a beautiful southern woman who awakens in him his buried youth, and he takes up his pen and writes an anonymous book of his young days and of his downfall. The book sells, but he is obliged to denounce it from the pulpit because of his bishop’s crusade against it. Unhappy complications follow and other characters bring into the story all the elements of tragedy.
[*] “There are excellent bits of portraiture in this story,—bits which make one regret that the book as a whole should be stamped as frankly and crudely melodramatic.”
| — + | Critic. 47: 578. D. ‘05. 120w. |
[*] “This novel is uneven, with some good touches, but, as whole, painfully harrowing, cheaply melodramatic, and decidedly unwholesome in its treatment of love. In an obvious attempt to achieve strength, the author has only compassed a cheap and florid rankness.”
| — | Lit. D. 31: 965. D. 23, ‘05. 580w. |
“She mars, too, by faults of taste, which belong to the current school of fashionable fiction, a story which in its elements is true and strongly human and developed with no little skill and cleverness.”
| + | N. Y. Times. 10: 637. S. 30, ‘05. 460w. |
“There is doubt, however, as to her soundness in dealing with moral questions and the wholesomeness of her manner of making her characters play about the edges of social sin. Those who found it difficult for this reason to like ‘Pam,’ with all its cleverness, will feel the same objection here.”
| + — | Outlook. 81: 526. O. 28, ‘05. 90w. |