The Greater Love. By Anna McClure Shell. (T. Fisher Unwin.
es.)—This is a story of provincial life in America. It differs in many ways from the books on this subject from which English readers have been accustomed to get their information. The scene of this novel is a country town called Broadhurst, in which the family of Hatherley have always lived as considerable people. When the novel opens their former glories have been revived after a period of poverty by the business enterprise of William Hatherley, the existing head of the family. The interest of English readers will centre less on the plot than on the picture of provincial society, which is very unlike the usual idea of go-ahead American life, and much more resembles a picture of society in an English industrial town. The High Church clergyman is of a type which it is almost impossible to believe to be anything but purely English, and the reader will have read some way before he discovers that the scene of the story is not on this side of the Atlantic. The plot of the novel is concerned with the return to Broadhurst of a former Miss Hatherley, who has contracted an irregular alliance in Paris, and the interest lies in the love of this woman for her child, and her desire to shield her from knowledge of the stain on her birth. The book is adequately written, but the central figure, that of Eleanor herself, is not wholly convincing.
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