Love's Shadow [Paperback]

Ada Leverson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 12, 2011

This collection chronicles the fiction and non fiction classics by the greatest writers the world has ever known. The inclusion of both popular as well as overlooked pieces is pivotal to providing a broad and representative collection of classic works.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'A perceptive, witty and wise portrayal of an ill assorted marriage and unrequited love ' randomjottings.typepad.com 'Saki meets Jane Austen in the delectable Edwardian comedies of Ada Leverson. A great discovery awaits her new readers' Barry Humphries --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Ada Leverson (1862-1933), the devoted friend of Oscar Wilde (who called her the wittiest woman in the world), wrote six timeless novels, each a classic comedy of manners. Love's Shadow, the first in the trilogy The Little Ottleys, is the perfect examples of her wit and style: no other English novelist has explored the world of marriage and married life with such feeling for its mysteries and absurdities.

Product Details

• Paperback: 166 pages
• Publisher: CreateSpace (October 12, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1461072123
• ISBN-13: 978-1461072126
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,730,956 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Charming comedy of manners, May 4, 2010

By 

A. G. "Passionate Booklover" (NY, USA) - See all my reviews

On the surface, Edith and Bruce Ottley seem like the perfect Edwardian couple - respectable, presentable and well mannered. However, in reality, Edith begins to feel a little bored with her marriage since Bruce is a man with many eccentricities and absurdities. Edith's husband seems to complain about everything and everyone and he thinks too well of himself. Luckily, Edith's friend Hyacinth Verney is there to bring a little excitement into Edith's dull life. Hyacinth is a beautiful and glamorous young woman whom everyone adores and admires. She appears to have the perfect life, except that the young woman is madly in love with someone who doesn't show any interest in her. Hyacinth cannot really understand why the man of her dreams doesn't seem to admire her like everyone else, thus she tries to do everything in order to win his attention. After many misunderstandings, heartaches and jealousies, Hyacinth and her beloved are finally united.

Love's Shadow is a classic comedy of manners and it deals with the affairs of the heart and its consequences. Ada Leverson masterfully explores the different facets of love - the love between friends, unrequited love and being in love. Furthermore, her novel draws a lucid portrait of married life, while revealing all its oddities, enigmas and obscurities.

Love's Shadow is packed with charm, wit, hilarious dialogue, eccentric characters and superb writing. Since the novel is set in the past and in England, it was the perfect book for me. I just loved everything about this book and I had to laugh many times while reading it. There are just so many witty remarks and funny characters in Ada Leverson's novel that you can't help but adore it! I liked all the characters except for Bruce Ottley since he is such a peculiar and unlikeable man! (However, I think that it was the author's purpose to portray him that way). Bruce is so obnoxious and so full of himself - he never seems content and he always finds fault with everything and everyone. I can fully understand why Edith is bored with him, since Bruce is so annoying with his attitude and outrageous behaviour. He thinks of himself as a `man of the world' when in reality, he is lazy, odd and ignorant. Furthermore, he treats his wife as if she were an object and a servant. Bruce thinks that Edith is not clever, but the truth is that she is more intelligent than he could ever be. However, Edith has to keep things to herself, because wives at that time couldn't take the liberty of opposing their husbands. But she still gets her own way quite often, because she is clever enough to let Bruce believe that he's in charge, when in reality, Edith has the upper hand when it comes to their marriage.

Love's Shadow was a pure delight and an enjoyable read and I recommend it to everyone out there who likes to read books set in the past and to everyone who likes to read about gender roles.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Didn't like this as much as I expected to..., July 19, 2010

By 

K. Huff (Radnor, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Love's Shadow: A Novel (Bloomsbury Group) (Paperback)

Love's Shadow is a very short novel about a group of upper-class people living in Edwardian London. There are Bruce and Edith Ottley; Hyacinth Verney, a local debutante; Cecil Reeve, an eligible bachelor; Anne Yeo, Hyacinth's companion, who imagines herself to be an elderly spinster (although she's no more than thirty); and others.

The biggest problem I had with this novel is that there doesn't seem to be much of a plot. The pace picks up at the end of the book, when a misunderstanding threatens Hyacinth and Cecil's happiness; but the book is more a series of character studies than anything else. However, the characters aren't very well fleshed out (with the exception of Bruce, who's a fantastic bore and I can't really understand why Edith stays with him).

The potential for the novel is there, it just doesn't hinge together well. Hyacinth and Cecil's marriage occurs halfway through the book, and so the rest of their relationship seems very anticlimactic to me. The concept of loving someone while still living in the shadow of that person's love for someone else is interesting, but I just didn't like the way that the book played out. The book is set in London, but really it could have taken place anywhere for all the description the author gives us. Overall, the book feels very dated (eg, the author's use of the word "flapper" to describe various young women in this story; it probably didn't mean the same thing at the time the book was written as it did in the 1920s). It's disappointing because I wanted to like this book so much, but it didn't live up to the expectations I had for it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Witty Romantic Comedy, March 16, 2010

By 

Nicola Manning (Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Love's Shadow: A Novel (Bloomsbury Group) (Paperback)

Reason for Reading: I'm reading all the Bloomsbury Group books.

Summary: This is Edith Ottley's story, though I wouldn't call her the main character. Though it is through Edith that all the characters can be traced back (as in the six degrees of Kevin Bacon). Edith and Bruce Ottley are a young married couple with a two year old son. Bruce is hard to describe without making him sound like a chauvinistic brute. He is also a hypochondriac and would rather not work and be served upon day and night. This is Bruce's character, but it is a pastiche of the weak yet dominating husband, though not mean-spirited, just self-centred. Edith takes advice from friends, especially her mother-in-law, and always complying cheerfully she never looses the upperhand and laughs off Bruce without him even knowing it. There is also Edith's friend Hyacinth, the real main character, who is a young twenties girl living on her own, with a companion, who is in love with a man who is love with someone else. Every other man is in love (or infatuation) with her including her friends' husbands, her former guardian and her ladies companion.

Comments: Hyacinth's story becomes the main focus of the plot while Edith and Bruce's stays in the foreground being the centre from which all other story arcs are in one way or another related. These other story arcs are filled with secondary characters having relationship problems themselves. Hyacinth's love, Cecil, is in love with an older woman Eugenia, who has vowed never to marry again and thinks of him as a boy anyway. Anne, Hyacinth's ladies companion gives very intelligent advice but is jealous of anyone who will take Hyacinth away from her. Then there's Bruce, who like everyman, is attracted to Hyacinth as well, but from afar and by drilling his wife on her visits with her.

Many other characters are intertwined as well and the dialogue is full of wit and repartie. Every character is simply adorable and lovable, even the mysterious Mr. Raggett who we never really fully understand but who, unlike the other men in this story, has fallen for Edith and woos her. Bruce, himself, does take some getting used to, being the only non-likable character but he always comes up short against Edith, without even knowing it and this quiet battle of the sexes is quite humorous.

It took me several chapters (short as they are) to get into the book but once I'd met everyone and the story got going I was completely smitten with everything, everyone and all the goings on in Knightsbridge, England. This is an intelligent, bright, witty romantic comedy. A truly delightful story that can be summed up in that ubiquitous term "the British cozy".