The Distant Lands (English and French Edition) - Hardcover

Green, Julien

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0714529095 ISBN 13: 9780714529097

Publisher: Marion Boyars, 1991

Synopsis

Immersed in her adopted South's aristocratic antebellum society, English-born Elizabeth Escridge is ill-prepared for the Civil War that is to destroy that world forever

About this title

About the Author

Julian Green published over 70 books in France and was a member both of the Academie Francaise and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Reviews

Elizabeth Escridge, a winsome blond English orphan of 16, comes to live with her slave-holding kin at Dimwood, their Georgia plantation, in this hefty, slow-building, floridly written novel of the antebellum South by noted French academician Green ( Adrienne Mesurat ), who as a child imbibed tales of his mother's Savannah girlhood. Elizabeth, developing from a pious innocent into an impassioned woman, drunk on moonlight and magnolias, is driven to casting occult spells in the Wood of the Damned in hopes of luring Jonathan Armstrong. Scapegrace Jonathan--seductive, mocking, diabolical--threatens to reclaim Dimwood as his family estate; in need of money, he marries a wealthy mulatto courtesan whom he grows to detest. Elizabeth, though wed to a sweetly placid man for whom sex is embarrassing ("It's not done in America"), becomes a "bacchante" in the bedroom. She makes love to both men, and bears a son of uncertain paternity. Though his gothic/romantic novel may be more aptly compared to Poe's "Ligeia" than to Mitchell's Gone with the Wind , Green is a poetic master at manipulating genre trappings--insolent aristocrats, buried family crimes, haunted mansion, sinister housekeeper and laudanum-drugged women who are victims or vampires. His skewed Gallic nightmare vision of the American South puts a distinctive spin on this monumental melodramatic read. A sequel is expected.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The US debut of a meganovel of the Old South by American expatriate Green, begun in 1934, put aside when Gone With the Wind appeared, completed in the 1980's and very successfully published- -more than 650,000 copies sold, we're told--in 1987 in Europe. The life and loves of beautiful Elizabeth Escridge, the 16- year-old English girl who comes to stay with her wealthy Hargrove cousins when her aristocratic father dies, are chronicled at a pace as languorous and enervating as a summer's day at Dinwood plantation, the Hargroves' Georgia home. Set in the years 1850-52, the possibility of war with the North is a pervasive subtext and handy dinner-party topic useful for alarming assembled guests and teaching Elizabeth more Southern history. Meanwhile, there are oblique hints of family secrets and plantation mysteries: a fatal fire in Haiti, where the Hargroves once lived; a forbidden wood of the damned; and a resident Welshwoman who terrifies them all. Elizabeth, at first homesick, soon adjusts and falls in love with notorious Jonathan Armstrong, whom she barely speaks to but just knows she loves, as he does her, though he nevertheless marries wealthy Creole and former prostitute Annabel. Then, when wealthy Uncle Charlie from Savannah takes her to Virginia, Elizabeth falls in love with and marries his son Ned. Naturally, it can't and doesn't end well: Ned and Jonathan kill each other in a duel; Elizabeth bears a son of debated paternity; and the War between the States draws closer. The Distant Lands is no Gone With the Wind, no matter how many mint juleps and magnolias fill its pages. Too melodramatic, too stiff, with a heroine sans any redeeming panache or intelligence: a readable but less-than-riveting tome whose transatlantic popularity says more about them than us. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Forced to leave England after the death of her father, Elizabeth Escridge and her mother arrive penniless at Dimwood Plantation, Georgia in 1850, completely dependent on the charity of relatives. As Elizabeth soon discovers, the apparently insipid plainness of the Southern landscape conceals dark secrets and throbbing passions. This is Green's Gone with the Wind , begun in the late 1930s but not completed until 1986. His Scarlett O'Hara is a far more Freudian heroine, out of control and a prey to lust for her Ashley Wilkes, here named Jonathan Armstrong. At times Green strains the credulity of the American reader with his bizarre genealogies and unlikely events, probably more believable to a European audience. But Green, the only American member of the French Academy, weaves a spellbinding, suspenseful tale not easily abandoned. Beaumont's translation is smooth. Readers seeking historical fiction of the antebellum South should not neglect this book.
-Bob Ivey, Memphis State Univ., Tenn.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Marion Boyars
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0714529095
• ISBN 13: 9780714529097
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 902