Sarah Eden. By E. S. Stevens. (Mills and Boon. 6s.)—.
Sarah Eden was an interesting woman she began life in a Devonshire farmhouse, where she was influenced but not " converted " by a Revivalist Mission, and stirred to thought by her first proposal, and by the discovery of convent life; then she married her cousin, John Eden. Their marriage was a dreary failure, since she could not give him the passion which he demanded, and his death left her free to follow, with her little daughter, her strong religious inclinations. So she set forth with a select party of " Edenites" to await in Jerusalem the immediate coming of the Christ. And we leave her, still eagerly expectant, shaken in her vocation neither by another proposal nor by the marriage of her daughter. Here is, at all events, fresh matter for a novelist. The story reads almost as a biography, for the drawing of the chief characters, eepecially of Sarah herself, is admirable, and Miss Stevens makes good use of her gift for detailed obser- vation in portraiture as well as in describing the city of Jerusalem. But we cannot help feeling that Mrs. Eden was more than a little neurotic in her visions and her Mother-Shipton-like prophecies; and the idea of a "mixed monastery," though delightfully worked out, is hardly con- vincing. Indeed, the genial figure of the young artist, who finds himself in conflict with all that the "brothers and sisters" hold most dear, comes as a relief from these rather inhuman folk.
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