Mathilde Eiker

(from endpaper -- inside jacket is too spoilery) Mrs. Mason's Daughters, Over the Boatside, The Senator's Lady, Brief Seductions of Eva -- these are the brilliant, witty, and mordant novels which have made Miss Eiker one of our outstanding women novelists. In "Heirs of Mrs. Willingdon" she tells the effect of a woman's death on the lives of her family. Mrs. Willingdon's death revived a family scandal. She had been a gay and dashing woman who "held hands with her chauffeur with one hand while she thumbed her nose at the world with the other." It also has to do with Avis, her step-daughter, aloof, cold, so refined above Mrs. Willingdon's hearty zest for life that she almost lost the meaning of it. Through the clash of these two vivid personalities, Miss Eiker discloses the strange and twisted story of a great romance.