Adrienne Toner
by (Mrs. Basil de Sélincourt). Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1922. l2mo, pp. iv+374. $2.00.
THE growth of beauty and strength in a character who at the outset and indeed for some time thereafter arouses in the reader only emotions of irritation and dislike is the difficult theme of this book. Adrienne Toner, an unattached American heiress, with boundless self-assurance, a meddlesome disposition, and inexorable obstinacy, makes her appearance in an English country-house in 1913, and enchants the family and especially the attractive son. How does she do it, being what she is? It is a considerable tribute to Miss Sedgwick’s skill to say that the conquest seems quite plausible. Young Barney has, however, a friend, a more mature person, Koger Oldmeadow, who does not come under Adrienne’s spell, and who cannot refrain from holding the mirror up to nature. Events prove to Barney, after marriage, that Oldmeadow’s perceptions were truer than his own. Adrienne loses her power and her pride when she loses her husband’s love; what she ultimately gains is brought out vividly in the scenes that follow the opening of the war. The tone of the book deepens and strengthens; the crises that test the characters become more poignant; the story culminates in an episode as moving as it is surprising.
Miss Sedgwick has had the courage and the art to carry through triumphantly a really amazing literary feat. Although she tells the story in the third person, she reveals the heroine to the reader only through the eyes of the unsympathetic male onlooker, Roger Oldmeadow. She not only makes the heroine vivid and real as seen through the eyes of this man, but she makes the man equally real. And, as the story proceeds, she draws this cool observer more and more deeply into it until finally he becomes a protagonist in a drama for which he had apparently been cast only i n the rôle of spectator. Oldmeadow and Adrienne are two effectively contrasted figures; the singular outcome of the relations of two persons who from the beginning were instinctively hostile to each other furnishes a striking dénouement.
One may praise Miss Sedgwick’s art, her sure dramatic touch, the keenness of her observation, and the sensitiveness of her perception, and yet one will have left unmentioned the element that gives to Adrienne Toner its rare beauty and dignity. That is the spirit in which the book is written. Adrienne Toner is not one of the numerous novels that are of the earth earthy, in spite of the moral obliquity, the deceitfulness of the methods which Adrienne and Oldmeadow employ to effect Barney’s release — a moral obliquity of which Miss Sedgwick seems curiously unconscious — the story has nobility of conception, motion, and expression.
ARTHUR STANWOOD PIER.