Customer Reviews

Ever After

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

Well I don't normaly do this but I was looking something up on the internet and I ran across a reveiw for this book and it made me really mad. It said, and I quote "Tragedy unravells the lives of a man, his wife and his young lover." Sounds like a really bad third rate romance novel am I right? Well, I just wanted to set the record straight on what this book is really about. Bracken is not the bad guy in the story as the other reveiw made him out to be, infact its his wife that left HIM for another man. He does fall in love with Dinah--but he doesn't do anyting about it until he is sure he can marry her properly and not make a scandel. Their are two other love stories in this book as well, Fitz and Gwen and Archie and Vergina, that will make you smile like your the one in love. I recommend this book to anyone-though I would read Dawns Early Light and Yankee Stranger first. Thane's writing is simple and beautiful and makes her readers feel as if they are actually in the story and expirencing the same emotions as her characters. I have yet to come across another author that makes me as crazy and a happy as Elswyth Thane.

This is the third in the Williamsburg series and one of my favorites. Set around the Spanish American War, it moves between the US, England and Cuba with memorable characters (both actual and fictional.) The whole series is well worth having if you like historical romance that is definitely not the "bodice-ripping" variety.

With this third book in Elswyth Thane's Wiliamsburg Series, I finally caught on to what she is doing: telling the story of successive generations of war correspondents. In "Dawn's Early Light" it was Julian Day keeping a journal of the Revolutionary War; in "Yankee Stranger" it was Cabot Murray acting as a spy infiltrating the Rebel ranks to get good stories for his father's newspaper. In "Ever After" there are two correspondents, the cousins Bracken Murray and Fitzhugh Sprague, each covering the war in Cuba at the end of the 19th century.

In "Ever After" the story of the Day/Sprague/Murray families moves away from Williamsburg; almost none of the novel is set there. Instead, we are transported to New York, England and Cuba from the winter of 1896 to the summer of 1899. Although "Ever After" was an enjoyable read, for me it fell somewhat short of the first two books in the series. For one thing I just couldn't care very much about the war for Cuban independence, Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders notwithstanding. The war occupied more of a background role than in the previous two books, which is good considering my lack of interest; although I have to say that Thane's descriptions of land crabs hovering around dying men lying in the sands of Cuba, waiting for them to die so as to feast on their wounds and soft tissues, was pretty ghastly. In typical fashion Thane wove actual historical characters seamlessly into her narrative, although, here, too, they were far less significant than in the previous two books, with Clara Barton and Theodore Roosevelt having only brief appearances.

The romances in "Ever After" were also much more flat and predictable than in the previous two books. And there was nothing in "Ever After" like the wonderful climactic scenes near the end of the first two books. Although Thane attempted to create one with Dinah and Bracken before the officers of Scotland Yard, it lacked much conflict or drama and wrapped up a little too quickly, nicely and neatly.

Also -- and this is totally me -- I was really disappointed with the way Thane handled Susannah Day's story. She was part of the very poignant ending of "Yankee Stranger", and when she appeared again at the very beginning of "Ever After" I was looking forward to discovering how her story would play out. I won't say anything else, so as not to be a spoiler, except that I was unhappy with how Thane chose to play out her character. It was not at all what I was hoping for.

In short, although "Ever After" is a nice read, and Thane does an excellent job of creating a sense of the time and place, the story just lacked spark. For me it was really 3.5 stars, but since I can't do that I'll round up to 4. I am looking forward to the rest of the series, and hope the remaining books are more like the first two.

This is one of those books you keep and read every year. Although a number of stories touch and diverge, it is Dinah and Bracken's romance that I return to over and over.

Thane's description of Dinah's flowering under the attention from Bracken is so sweet. The setting, England on the brink of WWII, is richly described. The difficulties they must overcome seem insurmountable, but love conquers all.