Word: clara
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Next morning, when Stanford University police and Santa Clara County sheriffs deputies met with Secret Service agents to coordinate security plans for Ford's visit, they discussed Moore. The security team broadcast a B.O.L. (Be On the Lookout) for Moore on its radio network...
...here is Clara Reeve, a sober send-up of the Victorian three-decker, as ingenious as an embezzlement scheme -and incidentally an astringent comment on the predicament of being female. As a little girl, Clara is orphaned, and raised in the forbidding London home of a pious uncle. When she is so light-minded as to laugh aloud at the antics of a bird in the garden, he whips her neck with a watch chain. The child accurately notes that it was indeed the custom to birch girls on the bared portions of their anatomies, but adds that nevertheless...
...selfsame uncle seizes his wife and shakes her furiously when, while promenading, she gazes about her at a glorious sunset. Clara finds this reaction extreme but correct: "Most authorities do maintain that a lady ought not to divert her gaze from the direction in which she is walking." Still, her uncle need not have raged; "a word-at most a frown -would have sufficed...
...Clara's lot improves miraculously, as can happen in Victoriana, when she inherits the fortune of her great-uncle Douglas, the fifth Baron Rhodes. In short order she marries her titled cousin Niles and thus becomes a countess. Whether the marriage is an improvement-whether, in fact, it is a marriage -is a question that remains open till the melodrama's final scenes. Niles is charming and affectionate but in an oddly distant mode. Months after the wedding, Clara remains utterly ignorant of the process by which her species reproduces itself. It is clear that Niles is unduly...
...much more can be said, lest the author's outrageous unlikelihoods become unglued. The dust jacket offers useful clues: a volcano erupting; a young woman, evidently Clara, holding a pistol and a rose; a young man, evidently Niles, holding a false face; and a rather sinister older woman. Readers who follow these tantalizations to the end will be richly rewarded-with everything save the real name of the author...