FIERCE DISPUTE - Hardcover

SANTMYER, HELEN HOOVEN

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814208347 ISBN 13: 9780814208342

Publisher: Ohio State University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Small-town America, ghosts, domesticity, and New World-Old World tensions - these combine in Helen Hooven Santmyer's second novel, The Fierce Dispute (1929), which feature a fiercely disputatious southern Ohio matriarch and her adult daughter locked in battle for the very soul of a child, Lucy Anne, from whose viewpoint much of the narrative unfolds.
The Fierce Dispute pits Margaret Baird, the proud bearer of the Linley-Hewitt-Baird family history, against Margaret's cosmopolitan and romantic daughter, Hilary. Set in the Xenia, Ohio, family home, the novel's real battleground is Lucy Anne herself, the child mired in conflict because she loves both her mother Hilary and grandmother Margaret.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

The success of ". . . And Ladies of the Club" has prompted reissue of the author's earlier works. This novel, her second, was originally published in 1929and the years have not been kind. Dated in form and content, it is what was once called a "woman's book," but a contemporary audience will find its simple sentimentality tame. In the Ohio town familiar to readers of Santmyer's other works, a genteel matriarchy lives in a once magnificent, now dilapidated family manse behind a locked iron gate. The trio, consisting of the disapproving grandmother, Mrs. Baird, her shamed daughter Hilary and granddaughter Lucy Anne, live cut off from the rest of the community. The tension between mother and daughter for the child's spirit and affection propels the plot, which hinges on the mystery surrounding the child's father, a musician, and the rosewood piano in the attic. For all its gothic posing, dark glances and histrionic dialogue, this is a colorless novel in which the few psychological insights are not sufficient to invest the narrative with vitality or credibility.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814208347
• ISBN 13: 9780814208342
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208