Word: gentian
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...meet herself coming and going. It is rather that the real history is so compelling that the histrionics of her characters sometimes seem frivolous and shoddy intrusions. It is hard, really, to care much about the courtly romance between Roger de Montbrun (Catholic knight of Toulouse) and Lady Gentian d'Aspremont (Cathar heretic), which takes up one-third of the book, at a time when, for example, human heads were actually being used as gun stones, and the brave Count of Toulouse, in order to save his people and make peace with the church, allowed himself to be publicly...
...like the blue gentian gleaming On the hillside by the shalin Purple blue in the sunlight Are the eyes of my Mary...
...passionate questions become more & more trivial ("Is barley syrup made from barley?"), the obsessive topics more & more Promethean and miserable ("The cowards, to keep an unarmed man imprisoned upon a rock!"). The books and encyclopedias on his tables are replaced by syringes and bowls, bottles of orange-flower water, gentian, licorice, quinine and calomel. The doctors hover around the bed, urging this & that on the dying dictator, until he shouts: "Shut up, you bore me!'' The conversation is of little else but the sickroom, the Emperor turning and twisting in pain on his iron bed. or hobbling feebly...
...19th should still be hugely popular. And it is plainly uncanny that such a writer as Novelist Goudge, with almost nothing to say, and small style to say it with, should be the one to write them. What is the secret of Author Goudge's success? Gentian Hill, her latest novel and the Literary Guild's first offer of the new year, can be studied as a casebook of her method...
...woof thread of joy"-which is a fair example of how the sonorous Victorian style sounds in Miss Goudge's version. However it sounds, Miss Goudge's simple optimism, her invariable happy endings and her soufflé of fairies and folklore always pull her through. Gentian Hill should do it again...