By Taylor Jasmine | On March 25, 2015 | Updated September 23, 2022 | Comments (0)
Ethan Frome (1911) by Edith Wharton is a slim but emotionally impactful novel. Subtly and haunting, it keeps the reader’s attention despite the somber storyline.
Make sure to read Edith Wharton’s own introduction to the novel, which begins:
“I had known something of New England village life long before I made my home in the same county as my imaginary Starkfield; though, during the years spent there, certain of its aspects became much more familiar to me.
Even before that final initiation, however, I had had an uneasy sense that the New England of fiction bore little — except a vague botanical and dialectical — resemblance to the harsh and beautiful land as I had seen.” Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On March 24, 2015 | Updated March 15, 2026 | Comments (0)
Pavilion of Women by Pearl S. Buck (1946) is a gem of a novel telling the story of the spiritual and intellectual awakening of Madame Wu, a pampered wife of the wealthy House of Wu. She announces to her husband that on the occasion of her fortieth birthday, she wishes to withdraw from their physical life as a couple.
Madame Wu beseeches her husband to take a second wife to serve him as the patriarch of one of the oldest and most prestigious households in China.
She herself carries out the arrangement, and withdraws to her own rooms to read books and live a life of the mind, something she never had the luxury to do as her sons grew up. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On March 19, 2015 | Updated September 25, 2022 | Comments (0)
From the Hazleton, PA Standard-Speaker, March, 1968, review by Miles A. Smith of Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton, published by W.W. Norton.
The early part of this book describes how the author, in 1958 when she was forty-six, found a dilapidated 18th-century farmhouse in a quiet corner of New Hampshire, settled in it, and began putting down new roots.
It was the first property Miss Sarton ever had owned. The rehabilitation of the house and the problems of furnishing it strike a familiar theme — so many other writers have described similar experiences. Yet she gives the account a fresh, individualistic touch. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On March 10, 2015 | Updated September 25, 2022 | Comments (0)
From the original review from The Coshocton Tribune, August, 1940: A haunting echo of something you can’t quite put your finger on pervades every page of Gypsy, Gypsy by Rumer Godden.
In tonal quality, the book is very much like Black Narcissus, Miss Godden’s previous novel. She has succeeded in weaving the same aura of mystery around the Normandy coast that she did around the Indian locale of Black Narcissus. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On March 9, 2015 | Updated September 25, 2022 | Comments (0)
Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher has delighted generations of young readers since it was published in 1917. A tale of a young girl’s growth toward independence, it has been reissued in numerous editions, proving its timelessness. The 1999 edition from Henry Holt and Co. described the book in brief:
“For all of her nine years, fragile Elizabeth Ann has heard her Aunt Frances refer in whispers to ‘those horrid Putney cousins.’ But when her aunt can no longer care for her, Elizabeth Ann is forced to leave a sheltered life to live in the wilds of Vermont with distant relatives. Read More→
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