Word: verena
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...generous fee, the Tarrants--a pair of 19th-century Cantabrigians with looks and behavior that seem more rodent-like than human-hand Verena's education, upbringing, and welfare over to Olive. She spirits the girl away to Beacon Hill, and away from all the distractions that could affect an impressionable young woman of that age. Olive's fear for Verena's "impurity" is a fear of everything outside the narrow Suffragist circle of dedicated ladies and genteel performs...
Olive wants nothing less for Verena than an airtight existence as her personal protege and possession. For a time, things work out: Verena is genuinely fond of her mentor, discloses her every thought and act, and shows promise as the darling of the East Coast parlour circuit as she delivers feminist addresses to fashionable audiences...
Basil Ransom remains equally taken with Verena. Beyond her fiery, teary feminist rhetoric, Ransom finds in her all he wants in a wife. While the girl is intrigued by the handsome stranger, and enjoys flirting as much as prosletyzing. Basil's intrusions into the idyll fill Olive--his distant cousin, it turns out--with morbid jealousy. The crossfire of affection, jealousy, and sheer emotional blackmail swirling around Verena intensifies, as Basil follows the women to the Vineyard, insistent that she allow him to replace Olive, the cause, and just about everything else in her life...
Vanessa Redgrave rises to the challenges of her role, decidedly a difficult one. She portrays Olive-essentially an unattractive, narrows-minded, selfish character--without condescension. There is genuine pathos about Olive's obsessiveness, as it is evident that Verena is her sole emotional focus: suffragism her only raison d'etre. But even her idealism is problematic--talking about women's suffrage, she sounds more like a mystic than a social reformer...
Madeleine Potter as Verena manages to create a character that is infinitely sweet without being insipid: an innocent but not an imbecile or a wimp. The ambiguity of Verena's character comes across-on one hand, she is being hailed as the champion of women's rights: on the other, she has little identity of her own. Ransom's old and Olive's new are alternately borrowed and discarded in an effort to keep all parties of the love triangle reasonably happy. At the same time, Verena is convincing and interesting enough--"an original," as an admiring New York matron...