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Novels and Novelists

Pressed Flowers

Pressed Flowers

A Lost Love — By Ashford Owen

This little book was first published in 1854. In the monograph which precedes it we are told by the author how she was not above the age of twenty-four when she page 184 wrote it, and how it brought her famous friends and fame. Browning, Tennyson and Swinburne she kindled; as to the Carlyles, she gives us not only a glimpse of them ‘at home’—was ever a couple more spied upon?—but a view of Carlyle, alone, in the South of France, standing, as it were, in flowery fields, in the shadow of lemon trees, and shaking his fist at the bare mountains—‘those starved pantries.’ If ‘A Lost Love’ had been a gentle carrying on of the monograph, if it had been permitted us to go on turning over the author's album, listening to her account of where the sprig of holly was pulled, and who was by when she gathered the aster, we should have found it more beguiling than the formal, rather dark little novel which kind hands have brought into the light again.

It is pleasant to think of the grave young girl choosing a pen to her liking, sitting down in her grave young way, and steeling herself for the great moment when the hero, brilliant and flashing creature, asks his affianced bride whether she cannot yet make up her mind to call him by his Christian name; it is pleasant, but the pleasure is a trifle pale. We read of the uncomfortable house where Georgy Sandon lived and made brown-holland covers for her nagging aunt, and went on a visit to a house where she met the most perfect man who ever took a young girl down to dinner; we read of how she ran away to London and was found by that same young man outside a pastrycook's, where she had been for a glass of water, and of how he carried her to his mother's house, where she begged most pitifully to be allowed to go to Brighton before she swooned away. And while we follow the course of their loves we realize that ‘it is not to be.’ The charmer whose letter has never reached James Erskine reappears and Georgy makes the supreme renunciation. We are not spared her pining away and dying, leaving James Erskine's only present to her to his little daughter; we are not spared the child's running up to her papa to show the bright thing and his touching the fair curls while memories … memories….

page 185

These are pressed flowers: the fashion for them is no more. They are not to be laughed at or condemned, but we have too little time to languish over them. Nevertheless, now and again, when Miss Ashford Owen forgot how solemn a thing it is to be a writer and to know all there is to know about Love and Death, she gives us a delicious little scene, as when Constance Everett runs up and down the passage in her ravishing little nightcap.

(May 7, 1920.)