SOURCE: “Grand Illusion,” in New York Times Book Review, January 28, 1996, p. 9.

In the following review, Barnes offers a positive assessment of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

Domestic and epic, intimiste and magisterial, In the Beauty of the Lilies begins with a sly misdirection. D. W. Griffith is filming “The Call to Arms” on the grounds of a mock-medieval castle in Paterson, N.J., in the spring of 1910. Mary Pickford, short of sleep and over-costumed for a hot day, faints. This scene takes two pages. But Griffith, Pickford and the Biograph Company never reappear in the novel, they are images raised to be wiped. Instead, cut to:

“At the moment when Mary Pickford fainted, the Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, down in the rectory of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the corner of Straight Street and Broadway, felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was...