Taylor Caldwell realizes full well the limitations and stupidities of her Melissa [the heroine of Caldwell's "Melissa"], daughter of a philosophic writer who has deliberately made a mess of her out of his villainous desire to dominate her and make her subject to his psychologically poisonous whims. But the author never intended that we should become painfully bored and irritated with the beautiful creature; and that miscarriage of Taylor Caldwell's purpose must be attributed to the apparent hurry, the lack of careful organization, the adjectival and prolifically adverbial style in which the novel is written. The author of "Dynasty of Death" and other best sellers seems to be writing too fast and too much. Even those who have regarded her strong, often lusty stories as good examples of intelligent, popular drama will be disturbed at her present work.
This novel of a passionately idealistic and fanatically narrow-minded girl who is married to an urbane, broad-minded publisher in the post-Civil-War period, is written in Taylor Caldwell's deepest purple. On almost any page the heroine palpitates, shivers, trembles, chokes, aches, weeps, denunciates, lies rigid and cold in her hard bed, clenches every muscle, wrings her handkerchief, has to clutch at furniture to keep from falling in a faint, feels her breast rising and falling with anguish and outrage, her body shaking with denial and horror and with fear.
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