Three Companion Pieces
THREE COMPANION PIECES $2.50 By LITTLE, BROWN
THIS book reminds me of Jennifer Lorn and The Venetian Glass Nephew of Elinor Wylie, and has a flavor, too, of the fantastic tales of David Garnett. It can be strongly recommended to those who enjoy good writing in that mode, for it is most engaging in its sureness of vision and lightness of touch. The three stories are all set in the past; one in the eighteenth century, and the two others in the early and middle nineteenth century. They tell the love stories of three young girls—a French ballet dancer who was seen one evening in Paris by a young English lord doing the Grand Tour, and taken away by him next morning to his family home in Cumberland, where as his wife she died of cold and boredom; an English early Victorian miss who made the voyage to India to bemarried to her uncle’s friend, and found — and lost — a new lover on the ship; and an Albanian peasant who carried the customs of her country in the matter of assassination into a mid-Victorian setting in Devon. But the charm of the book is in the skillful creation of ‘ æsthetic distance,’ the delicate, sustained irony of the writing, and the quiet wit. The illustrations of Anna Zinkeisen match the text perfectly in their skill and spirit.
E.D.