Berta Ruck

[from dust jacket flap] A clever, humorous, captivating love story, these words express inadequately this sparkling novel by Berta Ruck.

Three really pretty sisters, blue-eyed and golden-haired, live a healthy and rather sleepy life in one of the most quiet and remote villages in England, where they are far removed from young and attractive men.

The war changes things, and from dwelling in a manless desert, they find themselves in an oasis that fairly teems with young masculinity when hundreds of troops are quartered in their neighborhood.

One dapper young officer is even billeted in their own home. Then not only one love affair follows, but three -- mirth-provoking but full of charm. After surprise and counter-surprise, which leads one from page to page with ever-growing interest, each of the three love affairs winds up in an unexpected and delightful way.

Berta Ruck is a genius in picturing young girls, as her stories have well proved; but in "The Girls at His Billet" she has outdone herself. You will enjoy the story.

[from inner flap, Dodd Mead dj]

A high-spirited girl of twenty-three, pretty, well-bred, but penniless, tired of belonging to the class of the "come-downs" and of having neither the advantages of being rich nor the fun of being poor, flies in the face of tradition, and dons cap and apron in the service of Miss Million, a young heiress who has little notion of how to spend her vast fortune. The fun of looking after this little dollar princess lends new zest to life, but in heading off Miss Million's fortune-hunting suitors, Miss Lovelace herself falls for the absurdly blue eyes of an incorrigible Irishman, and so entangled grow the love stories of mistress and maid that the reader has a merry time with this clever author in steering the girls on the road to happiness.

"from the Evening Public Register (Philadelphia) 18 Aug 1916] Mrs. Oliver Onions (Berta Ruck has a formula, clever, adaptable and amusing. "In Another Girl's Shoes" is built on that formula and so is the story of an official fiancee. Whether the other works of this author are so constructed we do not know. The two mentioned are clever enough to justify repetition. "In Another Girl's Shoes" (Dodd, Mead & Co.) is the story of a charming young woman who is forced by circumstances to impersonate a war widow. The young man who biffed off and got married and biffed off a moment later to the trenches and was biffed off into eternity after several months left his moving-picture wife to his parents, who weren't her sort. So she shoved another girl into her place, and the young man wasn't killed after all, and the complications are such that you don't know how it is going to turn out, especially as there are two others, a man and a girl, mixed up in it. But it does turn out. So the book will do for the hammock. It is faultily printed and badly proof read.

Now that her father's away at war, 19-year-old Josephine (Joey) Dale has a lot to manage: an artistic sister, a frivolous mother, two small terrors of cousins, and a high-brow fiance who loves her for her "beautiful character". When she also accepts a commission from her mother's old school chum to find a bride for her engineering officer son before he's sent to the Front, is she taking on too much -- or is this just the job to shake up Joey's practical, self-sacrificing life?

[Republished in 1939 by Dodd Mead as Arabella Arrives.]

When well-to-do, down-to-earth village grocer Mr. Ames passes along an investment tip to the Squire that ends up saving the Cattermole family fortune, he requires no thanks for his good turn. What he wants, instead, is for the Cattermoles to take his only daughter, the gorgeous, gaudy, goodhearted, marigold-headed Arabella, into their home, make a lady of her, and find her a husband among their set. This, they reluctantly agree to do. Arabella's willing (to please her dad) and the toffs are weak -- but is this the life she really wants?

This volume contains one novella, "The Girl Who Was Too Good-Looking" and several interlinked short stories, collectively titled "Auntie Up-To-Date". "The Girl" was serialized in British papers in 1916. Three of the included short stories ("The Great Unmet", "Rufus on the Rebound", and "The Dream Domesticated" appeared in Harper's Bazaar in 1918.

"The Girl Who Was Too Good-Looking" relates the plight of a girl who is just that: "penniless orphan of a country clergyman", she has to work, but is constantly losing jobs over the harassment of men or the jealousy of women. And this, though she is anything but a flirt and, in fact, long-engaged to a distant cousin out tea-farming in Ceylon. Her luck finally turns when she's hired by a kind, man-hating masseuse, and meets again the handsome young soldier who'd gotten her fired, unintentionally, from her first place.

In "Auntie Up-To-Date", still unwed -- and still youthful -- at 42(ish) Rose Mellicombe employs her generosity and considerable wits in helping a host of (insufficiently grateful) nieces and nephews resolve their romantic tangles and find the true love she, at their age, lost.

[dust jacket flap] This charming story concerns the adventures of Mary Louise Threadgold and these adventures are within twenty-four hours, most of them twelve. Miss Threadgold is employed in a beauty shop. A boarding house companion needs money, and that very badly.

The Beauty Girl, as she is called by an aristocratic young woman, for whom she doubles, volunteers to sell a patch case that once belonged to Marie Antoinette, and takes it with her to work. This relic is supposedly a lucky talisman in love, and from the time the girl leaves her house carrying it, things happen fast, once they start, and they end only with a marriage definitely settled, where a day before it never had been suspected.

A young society woman sends for Miss Threadgold and induces her to double for her at a mask ball. Some are deceived by the substitution, others not. Anyway, the story from there becomes exciting and its development so rapid that the reader begrudges the double-named young woman the few hours sleep she gets during that eventful night.

[from dj inside flap] When Blodwen Garth disappeared from her home, she was posted all over England as the "Missing Girl," with her photograph and personal description in every newspaper. All sorts of guesses and reasons were invented for the young lady's disappearance -- all sorts, that is, except the one real reason -- which was that Blodwen was engaged to be married -- and she wasn't in love. As a matter of fact, she hated love and wanted only to finish her musical career. So, being an independent person, she quietly disappeared.

But little did she realize that in running away from one marriage which she found detestable she was racing into the arms of another lover who was to offer her marriage entirely without love. To give more than this hint of the unusual marriage between Alan Wareham and Blodwen Garth would spoil the story for the reader. This much may be told -- that THE LOVE-HATER is one of Berta Ruck's most thrilling love-stories with e ough surprises and sensations to make two or three novels and an ending which even the Love-Hater had to admit was the happiest possible.

[From part of dust jacket(?) found clipped and tucked into book]

When Flight-Lieutenant James Courtenay-Wright, R.A.F., met the beautiful young nurse called Honey, it was a definite case of love at first sight. And a certain handsome, wealthy patient of hers reacted in precisely the same manner. Unfortunately for one of these men and fortunately for the other, Honey was devoted to her family and they were extremely poor. So romantic love, it seemed, could play no part in her life.

Then the member of the R.A.F. was interned in a German Prisoners-of-war Camp, which, strangely enough, altered the situation somewhat. What happened goes to make up one of Berta Ruck's most timely and exciting stories.

[From review in The Sydney Morning Herald Oct 9, 1931]

The trend of Miss Ruck's cheerful romance, "The Lap of Luxury," is perfectly obvious from the first. While at the seaside, Sylvia, an unbelievably pretty teashop waitress, meets Bert, a mechanic, whose personable figure cannot be entirely effaced by his oily overalls and workman's cap. They appear to have fallen in love at first sight, but Sylvia suddenly discovers she has rich relations who frown upon Bert so long as wealthier suitors are available. Sylvia's adventures among her patrician friends, with Bert lurking tenaciously in the background, are related with Miss Ruck's accustomed vivacity. The old-fashioned moral of the story -- to the effect that wealth and happiness are not synonymous -- is not assisted by the author's over-indulgence in italics.

NOTE: I'm using the original artwork by Leon desRosiers, Sr. for the Dodd, Mead cover in the book photo. My own copy is Cassell 1933 (Cheap Edition) reprint but the dust jacket of the Dodd, Mead is more accurate and way more charming. Most of the Dodd Mead covers just were.

[from back of dust jacket]

All marriage is an intrusion of sorts. Into some lives it seeps quietly like a sea-mist. Ford Atherton found more kick in the kind that crashes down like an avalanche.

When the beautiful, gifted and wealthy Bryda Malone, with her own reasons for this desperate step, proposed marriage to a young workman out of an aircraft factory, she little knew what avalanche she had set in motion.

This is the story of how it crashed; though fortunately. The date is early in this War. The setting shifts from Bryda's home in the Midlands to a picturesque village on the Welsh Coast.

[from inner flap of dj] She must give a sherry party: she owed it to so many clients and friends; but while Charmian was making the list of guests she found herself imagining what a different party she would have if she could only turn back the years, invite the people she had known and loved before she became 'Madame Charmian of The Boutique'. Nostalgically, she called up for her second, fantasy party the ghosts of the attractive young men and the glamorous girls who had been her friends; in whose company she had known all the happiness -- and pain -- of youth.

And even as she dreamed, Fate was arranging a third party for her; neither of the present nor of the past, but of the future.

[from inner flap of Dodd, Mead & Company (1962) edition] This is the story of a woman who, while making a list of guests to be invited to her sherry party, was struck by the thought of what a different list she would have if she could put back Time's clock and invite her friends out of the past. In imagination she called up the attractive young men and the glamorous girls who would have made up that dream party. This is their story -- a story that was to end in still a third party for the hostess, as happy and unexpected as her fondest dreams. Here is Berta Ruck in a gay new novel, with a real golden surprise at the end of the rainbow.

[from inner flap dust jacket] There is first of all a famous string of pearls that had been reset for a Countess; an uncle who is a diamond merchant and dealer in precious stones -- very old, annoyingly crabbed, most suspicious, whose god is money, and who has spent a lifetime trading in priceless jewels; then there is a very good-looking young man who is to inherit the uncle's fortune; and last there is Sheila Curtis, who spent her days in the dark and musty-smelling jeweler's shop -- her beauty eclipsed by the murkiness of her surroundings. Suddenly, dramatically, life was changed for these people. Calamity overtook them --- the famous pearls were stolen. And Sheila Curtis, who last saw them, was dismissed from the musty shop. The mystery only deepens when Sheila, daringly gowned in the latest and most striking creation of the greatest of all Paris coutouriers, meets the young man again at the Ice Carnival at a winter resort in Switzerland, the exclusive playground of the idle rich.

Berta Ruck has lost none of the charming style that captured her first large audience, and with book after book she has successfully held this elusive public.