Love and Louisa. By E. Maria Albanesi. (Sands and Co.
6s.) —Louisa is a delightful and interesting person ; it is quite a pleasure to know her. The reader is first introduced to her late one afternoon as she is returning to her father's house, having run away from a drunken husband. Early next morning she thinks better of her flight and goes back to him, only to see him die. He leaves her very rich and bitterly prejudiced against marriage, but not against men, for she has never hated him, though his faults have repelled and frightened her. She is young, with that great desire for enjoyment and freedom which is the natural outcome of reaction after the life of repression and humilia- tion which circumstances have obliged her to lead. Without recourse to elaborate descriptions of beauty or disquisitions upon charm, the author has managed to give her heroine a quite unusual attraction, an attraction which makes up for several, serious defects in the book. The action of the story is not very well managed, and drags a little. The devoted and patient hero is something of a prig, and the reader grudges him his final success. The wicked doctor is a lay figure. The second heroine, who is admirably sketched, drops out of the story at the end without any suggestion being made as to what became of her beyond. the fact that she went back to America. We recommend the story of Louisa to all those who enjoy the now rare sensation of falling in love with the heroine of a noveL Madame Albanesi knows how to draw women, but certainly, so far as this book is concerned, she fails altogether in her portraits of men.
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