Clare Strong. By G. Beresford Fitzgerald. (White and Co.)— Clare
Strong is a pleasantly written book, showing literary taste and feeling, and free, in consequence, from many defects which are too common in novels of the present day. The book is, how- ever, throughout, too slight and sketchy. The author who could describe with such delicate humour the honeymoon of the fair American, or could strike-out such a dramatic effect as the death of the successful statesman, ought to have produced something' more powerful and substantial than Clare Strong. Such slightness of treatment, in a novel couched in the form of an autobiography, may be intended to throw a side-light on the reserve and manliness of the hero and narrator; but the serious interest of the book should not have been sacrificed to any such motive. We think, too, that Mr. Fitzgerald has, in one of his incidents, allowed to pass what is at once an artistic blemish and an anachronism. We refer to the facility with which his heroine consents to a marriage with a divorced man in his wife's lifetime. This seems to us alike in- consistent with her character as he has described it, and an unusual occurrence at the date of his story, though common enough, we fear, in our own day.
Previous page
