Anyway here's the one from Dona Celestis.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Dona Celestis
The little picture under the title-- there must be a term for that, but I don't know what it is!
Anyway here's the one from Dona Celestis.
Anyway here's the one from Dona Celestis.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Keeper of the Door, 1952
The back cover blurb's nice too:
Did Dr. Max Wyndham hold the keys of life and death in his hands? And did he open the door intentionally to let Violet Campion pass through to the Beyond? Could she marry Max Wyndham and remain faithful to the memory of her friend? These are the torturing thoughts which troubled Olga Ratcliffe.
The events of that terrible night when Violet Campion died so tragically proved too much for Olga, and after many weeks of illness caused through brain fever, she recovered to find that memories of the past were beyond her -beyond her till the whisperings of the hated Hunt-Goring revived the awful fear that the real facts of her friend's death were being hidden from her.
How she discovered the truth and her final emergence from the valley of the shadows to ultimate happiness make an absorbing story, told by an authoress who not only gives her readers entertainment but solves with unerring skill some of the deeper problems which beset mankind.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Nettie and Sissie, by Penelope Dell
Just found on Ebay. This looks interesting!
"A Biography of the Best-Selling novelist ETHEL M.DELL and her Sister, Ella, written by their adopted niece."
"A Biography of the Best-Selling novelist ETHEL M.DELL and her Sister, Ella, written by their adopted niece."
Monday, August 2, 2010
Peggy By Request - it was okay
Done with Peggy. It was okay, but not as fabulous as some of the other novels. It took a looooong time to get to anything, and then I think the author actually missed some opportunity for buildup. Peggy and Noel had FUN times together when she was six and he was twenty-two! They should have at least reminisced about that and smiled together! But it was almost like two people met casually, liked each other and gradually fell in love in the normal course of things. There's some drama when disgraceful behavior on Noel's part is revealed, and Peggy reacts in a slightly unexpected way, which develops the characters-- but the solution, frankly, is pretty stupid and contrived, and so's the denouement. Peggy should have married Captain Turner, who loved her enough to fight for her! Nope, I wasn't overly impressed, and I'll just list it again on Ebay.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Links to other free Ethel Dell stories
Death's Property
Eleventh Hour, The
Experiment, The
Her Own Free Will
Knight Errant, The
Looker-On, The
Nonentity, The
Place of Honour, The
Question of Trust
Return Game, The
Sacrifice, The
Safety Curtain, The
Swindler's Handicap, The
Tidal Wave, The
Without Prejudice
Woman of His Dream, The
http://www.classicreader.com/author/334/
I don't see a link to The Hundredth Chance... I'd like to read that one.
Eleventh Hour, The
Experiment, The
Her Own Free Will
Knight Errant, The
Looker-On, The
Nonentity, The
Place of Honour, The
Question of Trust
Return Game, The
Sacrifice, The
Safety Curtain, The
Swindler's Handicap, The
Tidal Wave, The
Without Prejudice
Woman of His Dream, The
http://www.classicreader.com/author/334/
I don't see a link to The Hundredth Chance... I'd like to read that one.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
link to GREAT scanned dust jackets!
There's a whole BUNCH of them here! Cool!
http://www.ladybluestocking.com/List%20of%20Jackets/Unrestored%20Jackets.html
And one "restored" of Rocks of Valpre...
http://www.ladybluestocking.com/List%20of%20Jackets/njv/Rocks%20of%20Valpre%20DJ.html
http://www.ladybluestocking.com/List%20of%20Jackets/Unrestored%20Jackets.html
And one "restored" of Rocks of Valpre...
http://www.ladybluestocking.com/List%20of%20Jackets/njv/Rocks%20of%20Valpre%20DJ.html
Knave of Diamonds (Barbara Cartland edition) cover
Peggy By Request cover
In Keeper of the Door, the heroine for a short time is interested in Noel Wyndham instead of his older brother Max. Noel Wyndham's a very good sport-- at the end of the story he's still cheerful, and playfully consenting to marry a girl who's very much in love with him and has been following him around through the whole book-- beautiful blonde Peggy, then six years old! Ethel Dell was besieged with requests from readers to know what, if anything, happens with these two once Peggy grows up!
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Monday, March 29, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Illustration from Keeper of the Door
I scanned this one myself from the novel I bought on Ebay for my sister.
Max wasn't blond, he was a redhead, described very unflatteringly in a couple places! His characteristic was that he was always standing around with his hands in his pockets. Olga may have been blonde but wasn't a golden blonde like this-- it only says several times that she was "colorless." Max described her to someone else as "the kind of woman you don't notice right away"!
Well... it's still a nice picture even if it's not Max and Olga :-)
Max wasn't blond, he was a redhead, described very unflatteringly in a couple places! His characteristic was that he was always standing around with his hands in his pockets. Olga may have been blonde but wasn't a golden blonde like this-- it only says several times that she was "colorless." Max described her to someone else as "the kind of woman you don't notice right away"!
Well... it's still a nice picture even if it's not Max and Olga :-)
Monday, March 22, 2010
The Keeper of the Door
My diary, March 13, 2010
Reading more Ethel Dell. It's fun to have a really good book and be less than halfway through it, with a bunch more pages left.
It's The Keeper of the Door, and I already care deeply about all the characters. They are so real, so interesting! I seriously can't begin to guess what will happen. What IS Violet's problem???
March 20th
Before we left I SAT on the couch doing nothing else but finish my book. Mark that one on your calendar. I wasn't eating or working out or anything else, I was just reading because I had to see what was going to happen. It's been a long time since I did that.
Ethel Dell's a plotting genius! There was that magical element, the one big problem that was enough to keep us reading to the end. I think this was the most strongly plot-driven romance I've ever read. You know how some stories you just want to say, "okay enough already, forgive each other and get a room"?
Not this one! This was a HUGE problem of the nearly-insurmountable kind which MUST keep the two lovers apart, and honestly I couldn't imagine how they would solve it. It was genuinely impossible for the hero to explain himself to her. So out of gallantry, he has to allow her to assume the worst about him. They have an absolutely sizzling conversation, in which she appeals to him for the sake of love to let her out of their engagement, and he appeals for the sake of love that she stay in it-- if she really loves him, can't she choose to overlook the evil that she believes about him?
The book started with Olga being so irritated with Max that she stabs a sewing needle into his hand and breaks off the point. OUCH! But we are all paying attention now! It explains later that Max might not ever have noticed her otherwise. He's a doctor and very observant and intelligent, and guessed from the needle incident that she has the hots for him and is in denial about it.
Max is Irish with bright green eyes. Olga watches a green dragonfly kill a red butterfly, and fancies in horror that the green is Max's eyes, and that he's an evil, manipulative person. And yes, from the clues that Olga possesses, you don't blame her at all for wondering!
The largeness of the problem was plenty to string us along to the resolution, and yet there were a lot of fascinating subtangles too. One of them was Olga's nasty old neighbor, who had extracted a promise from her when she was younger, to kiss him sometime in the future as penalty for some minor trespass. Now that she's of age, he comes around "playfully" thinking he's going to harass her into keeping this promise. He entices her out on the ocean in his yacht and pulls a Victorian villain stunt, threatening to ruin her reputation unless she agrees to marry him. Rather than any resolution you'd expect, Olga looks off into the distance and suddenly realizes that she is completely in love with Max, and she's so transported with this truth about herself that she ceases to notice or care about the old lecher, and offhandedly tells him what he can do with his nonsense. It's a delightful scene! Delightfully different, too, that the heroine realizes her own starry-eyed-ness first for a change.
I cannot but admire that lady's writing. They said she was a shy girl, well she must have been a born genius, her craft is just amazing! EVERYTHING happens in Keeper, absolutely everything. Is there going to be a tiger attack? You know it. And who will show up to shoot the tiger? Oh for heaven's sake NO!! But yes. Ethel Dell isn't afraid of implausibility-- she is the master, and it happened this way because she says it did! The poor heroine, colorless, shy, "not the kind of woman you'd notice right away," and the hero, with his red hair sticking up, his carpet slippers, his hands always in his pockets, how can you NOT just ache for them both?? Max's sweet younger brother Noel whom Olga almost ends up with-- well, we WISH him everything the best in the world, and at the end, it's clear that he's eventually going to get that! LOVE it, I want another sequel. This was the sequel to Way of an Eagle.
Reading more Ethel Dell. It's fun to have a really good book and be less than halfway through it, with a bunch more pages left.
It's The Keeper of the Door, and I already care deeply about all the characters. They are so real, so interesting! I seriously can't begin to guess what will happen. What IS Violet's problem???
March 20th
Before we left I SAT on the couch doing nothing else but finish my book. Mark that one on your calendar. I wasn't eating or working out or anything else, I was just reading because I had to see what was going to happen. It's been a long time since I did that.
Ethel Dell's a plotting genius! There was that magical element, the one big problem that was enough to keep us reading to the end. I think this was the most strongly plot-driven romance I've ever read. You know how some stories you just want to say, "okay enough already, forgive each other and get a room"?
Not this one! This was a HUGE problem of the nearly-insurmountable kind which MUST keep the two lovers apart, and honestly I couldn't imagine how they would solve it. It was genuinely impossible for the hero to explain himself to her. So out of gallantry, he has to allow her to assume the worst about him. They have an absolutely sizzling conversation, in which she appeals to him for the sake of love to let her out of their engagement, and he appeals for the sake of love that she stay in it-- if she really loves him, can't she choose to overlook the evil that she believes about him?
The book started with Olga being so irritated with Max that she stabs a sewing needle into his hand and breaks off the point. OUCH! But we are all paying attention now! It explains later that Max might not ever have noticed her otherwise. He's a doctor and very observant and intelligent, and guessed from the needle incident that she has the hots for him and is in denial about it.
Max is Irish with bright green eyes. Olga watches a green dragonfly kill a red butterfly, and fancies in horror that the green is Max's eyes, and that he's an evil, manipulative person. And yes, from the clues that Olga possesses, you don't blame her at all for wondering!
The largeness of the problem was plenty to string us along to the resolution, and yet there were a lot of fascinating subtangles too. One of them was Olga's nasty old neighbor, who had extracted a promise from her when she was younger, to kiss him sometime in the future as penalty for some minor trespass. Now that she's of age, he comes around "playfully" thinking he's going to harass her into keeping this promise. He entices her out on the ocean in his yacht and pulls a Victorian villain stunt, threatening to ruin her reputation unless she agrees to marry him. Rather than any resolution you'd expect, Olga looks off into the distance and suddenly realizes that she is completely in love with Max, and she's so transported with this truth about herself that she ceases to notice or care about the old lecher, and offhandedly tells him what he can do with his nonsense. It's a delightful scene! Delightfully different, too, that the heroine realizes her own starry-eyed-ness first for a change.
I cannot but admire that lady's writing. They said she was a shy girl, well she must have been a born genius, her craft is just amazing! EVERYTHING happens in Keeper, absolutely everything. Is there going to be a tiger attack? You know it. And who will show up to shoot the tiger? Oh for heaven's sake NO!! But yes. Ethel Dell isn't afraid of implausibility-- she is the master, and it happened this way because she says it did! The poor heroine, colorless, shy, "not the kind of woman you'd notice right away," and the hero, with his red hair sticking up, his carpet slippers, his hands always in his pockets, how can you NOT just ache for them both?? Max's sweet younger brother Noel whom Olga almost ends up with-- well, we WISH him everything the best in the world, and at the end, it's clear that he's eventually going to get that! LOVE it, I want another sequel. This was the sequel to Way of an Eagle.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
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