Eve's Orchard

The romance of a house, actually, and of Eve Mannersfield who owned it -- a quiet, lovely house in Connecticut, a house with an orchard. Miss Widdemer writes quietly and with graceful humor of a girl who, returning to her native New England from a life of business success and gayety in New York City, finds that life has new problems, new responsibilities and abiding loyalties. She discovers that it is not only a new manner of living that is important to her; but also the man who, in the atmosphere of town life seemed glamorous, becomes a new influence as she turns to older values. Her near-tragedy is averted. Her life and the lives of those about her fall into a clearer pattern.

A nostalgic book -- and one in which Miss Widdemer creates her most appealing heroine.

Eve, orphaned young and raised by an aunt who runs a baking business out of their ancestral Connecticut home, throws up her job as a promising NYC publicity assistant after becoming (secretly) engaged to a charming, mercurial, pleasure-loving young Southerner. When a career disappointment on his end postpones their marriage, she retreats to the childhood home she's inherited where she acquires, in short order, an old man, a small boy, a pair of sponging houseguests, a cow, and an interesting neighbor -- son of the Chairman of Northern Steel, a Harvard grad of 10 years, and already a renowned pomologist. Will she stick with the feckless fiance or shift her favors to blue-eyed, wind-burnt, quiet & dependable boy next door? What do you think? It's an old story, Eve and her apples, but here there's no serpent but a snake-in-the-grass wealthy widow friend, and it's not Eve who's tempted there.

This is one of Widdemer's better books, in my opinion -- more about Eve's rediscovering her principles and finding strength in being true to them than it is about the romance, even, and I always enjoy a good building-a-business theme, too. Widdemer is really good at drawing deeply unlikable side character -- narcissistic, manipulative, abusive, or just plain unhinged -- and, while I'm not sure anything tops Loyal Lover in that department, the ones here are satisfyingly unpleasant. Interesting references, as usual, to the differences between pre- and post-war (that's WWI) values, which seems to have been a preoccupation of Widdemer's during this period at least. Downsides: the n-word is used once and there's a kind of uncomfortable suggestion of the heritability of "good" traits -- "pride of race", etc. (though she means, specifically, Connecticut old-stock Quality). Also on display, her penchant for overdescribing food ("They got quite friendly over the hot creamy coffee, the buttery rolls..", etc.), which is one of my pet peeves -- a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet really should know better, right?