Marjorie Huntingdon: A Novel

Publisher's cloth 12mo, 322pp. Very Good with minor rubbing, sunning to spine and bumping to the upper corner. Dried clover laid in at p310. The first of two novels written by Harriett Pennawell Belt, of Wilmington, Delaware. Marjorie Huntingdon is the story of a young woman from a prosperous Hudson Valley family who undergoes the usual course of finishing school, has some ill-fated loves and personal tragedies. Wright III 469. Reviewed in Lippincott's Magazine (Nov. 1884): "Marjorie Huntingdon" is a pleasant book, its sustained interest perhaps a little marred by its discursiveness and the minute and leisurely fashion in which trifling incidents are handled and unimportant details elaborated. Yet the story is worked out with a sort of loving care which wins the reader's sympathy. It is a biographical novel of the English type, which may now be called old-fashioned, so accustomed have we become to the novel that treats only an episode. It opens with the heroine at the age of sixteen, and carries her on for some years until she is well past twenty; and, as she is a graceful and pleasing girl, without too ardent a self-consciousness or too vigorous an individuality, one does not tire of her. Everybody is a little too much in earnest for the book to be amusing, and the humorous effects of every-day existence are too wholly lost sight of."