Ever After [Library Binding]

Elswyth Thane (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1997

In Ever After, Bracken Murray visits London duing the Jubilee summer of 1897 after his wife deserts him. Here he falls in love with an English girl. Meanwhile back in the USA his cousin Fitz rescues a music-hall singer who f alls in love with him. '

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Library Binding: 334 pages
• Publisher: Buccaneer Books (April 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568492308
• ISBN-13: 978-1568492308
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #960,049 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Late Victorian Romance and History at Their Best!, June 10, 2001

By 

Ellen McDaniel-Weissler (LaVale, Maryland United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ever After (Library Binding)

For many years my favorite of the Williamsburg Novels (I even named my only son after the main character!) "Ever After" is a delectible evocation of late Victorian life in America and England. One of the blessed qualities of the writing of Elswyth Thane is that she can take each character of each generation of her families and make them vivid, alive, humanly recognizable, and -- most amazing feat of all -- DIFFERENT! Dinah Campion is no more Tibby Mawes than Bracken Murray is St. John Sprague, and all Thane's heroines, from Tibby to Eden to Virginia and beyond have their own decidedly varied personalities. Less war-oriented than her first two novels, "Ever After" tells the story of loves delayed (as loves and lives always are) by the interruption of violence into well-ordered lives. With her usual deft pen Thane not only reconstructs turn-of-the-century Williamsburg for us, but turns her talents to late 19th century New York and England as well. More than any other of her books, I think, this one depicts exquisitely the settings where her characters live and function: the fascinating city that was New York in the Gay 90s -- early vaudeville with its colorful characters, fashionable Park Avenue where the very rich dressed and partied and lived in isolated splendor, the seamier side of existence where vices of every kind could make the frightened sister of a tawdry vaudeville suicide expect to have to pay back the men who rescue her in the "usual" way. And Thane's beloved England sparkles through her eyes, not only in its upper-class, fox-hunting, tweed-wearing, manifiestations, but in the lonely lives led by the ignored and repressed offspring of the rich and elite. Through Thane's skill as a story-teller and the window she seems to possess into the human soul, what might be a completely unbelievable tale of love at first sight becomes an entirely comprehensible exercise in passion and self-restraint. Music fills this book, literally and figuratively, and the Spanish-American War, when it erupts into these sophisticated and civilized pages, takes us away from that music only momentarily. The disputes and disagreements of war are not the main conflicts in this novel; love postponed, love seemingly impossible, love triumphant are the themes, and Thane lifts us out of ourselves and into the hearts of her characters with all the skill of a conjuror. A honey of a book, and a dilly of a portrait!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Be careful of newer editions, September 19, 2005

By 

S. Kurtz (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ever After (Library Binding)

I read all of Thane's "Williamsburg novels" in the 1970's in what I remember being original library editions, and liked them very much. A couple of years ago, I ran into what looked to be a clean copy of "Ever After" at a local bookstore, and bought it, happy to have a copy of a work I remembered from my childhood. On reading it, though, I was confused to realize that it had been expurgated -- the references to drinking were almost all excised. Thane was an author of her time, writing about another time, and in both of them social drinking was an accepted thing, but none of her characters drank excessively, and it would be hard to interpret her books as endorsing alcohol, so the edits were very mysterious. There was no re-writing involved, and in one case the cut left a grammatical glitch that reads very awkwardly. I asked around when I first realized this, but could find no one that had any additional information on the press or its policies.

The copy is from something called Hawthorn Press, and the only bibliographic information it has is from the original printing in 1945. The copy feels too new to be of that vintage, though, so I'm not sure what the actual edition is. Just realize that you might wind up with slightly less story than Thane originally wrote.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best In The Series, April 21, 2002

By 

Jessica Taylor - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ever After (Library Binding)

This is another example of Elswyth Thane's magnificent writing skill! Elswyth Thane has the great talent of combining historical facts and figures with fictitious and romantic plots without overdosing in either element.
In Ever AFter, the story opens on Susannah, now aged and spinsterish but still writing as fervently as ever. On Eden, now married to journalist Cabot Murray and the mother of three grown children. Bracken, her eldest, is a somewhat resigned young man who shows promise in the feild of journalism. His sister, Virginia, is a blossoming and flirtatious southern belle who hooks nearly every man who looks at her. And Fitz, the son of Sedgwick and Melicent Sprague, Fitz's only companions it seems are his piano and Sue. He is the outcast of the family, the one oddity that no one understands except Sue.
As Fitz leaves the shelter of Williamsburg and his songwriting, he takes a job with Cabot's paper in New York and there meets Gwen, an actress who will change his life's course forever. Meanwhile, Sue, Bracken and Virginia set out for England for the Jubilee celebration. There they encounter Sir Gration Forbes-Carpenter, who is a war veteran from the war in Africa. This leaves Sue with a choice that will plague her conscious forever; her spontaneous friendship with Sir Gration or her deep and forbidden love for Sedgwick...
However, Sue is not the only one who finds love in England. Bracken, still hurt from his not-quite-finished divorce with Lizl Olezei, finds Dinah Campion. Immediately touched by her young and sweet innocence, Bracken is forced to conceal his love for her until she is of age to marry.
Matters become more complicated as the steadily growing conflict between Spain and Cuba erupts into war. Fitz and Bracken are forced to go to Cuba as war correspondents and must leave their newfound loves behind.
Take my advice if you have already read Dawn's Early Light and Yankee Stranger and read this book. You won't be disappointed.