Done reading Bars of Iron. Yet another Dell novel completely different from all the others before it! I'm amazed. What a versatile author she was!
The hero is a very young man, and the lady of his interest is a 28 year old widow living with the parson's family-- the widow, as it turns out, of a guy he killed in a barfight when he was an even younger man. Whoa, the drama level was out the ceiling.
Absolutely great stuff until the very end when WW One is allowed to solve the protagonists' problems, along with all other problems currently about, which irritated me a bit. The author's very enthusiastic about it:
"Germany who is going to cut out all the rot of party politics and bind us together as one man! Germany who is going to avert civil war and teach us to love our neighbours! Nothing short of this would have saved us. We've been a mere horde of chattering monkeys lately. Now--all thanks to Germany!--we're going to be men!"
Uh-huh. But Ethel Dell's never made any secret that she thinks the world-spanning British Empire is the Greatest. Thing. Evar.
