Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Norman Douglas

Critical Essay by Norman Douglas

SOURCE: "Fiction", in Experiments, Robert M. McBride and Company, 1925, pp. 23-32.

In the following essay, Douglas provides a plot summary of Glyn's novel The Sequence and praises Glyn's ability to write of events considered shocking—particularly sexuality—without being crude.

The Sequence is a simple tale. Guinevere, at the age of seventeen, is forced into a loveless marriage with a stern soldier twice, or possibly thrice, her own age. She is an old-fashioned, refined, and misunderstood female with "a demure air and a rebellious gleam in her eyes"—she lives in a state of trembling sensibility and in abject terror of her grumpy old male. So far good. But he, the husband, is a less probable creature; his harshness is rather overdone; he calls her a "hateful iceberg" and "the coldest bit of womankind I've come across." Ladies do not like being called icebergs. Such remarks are always rude, and sometimes incorrect....
(read more)