The Way of An Eagle
   Ethel M. Dell
  1925 Amereon Ltd.
   ISBN: 0884112942


Muriel Roscoe & Nicholas Ratcliffe, surviving a massacre on a far-flung British fort in the Himalayan foothills at the apex of the British Empire, do not so well amid the quicksands & treacheries of English society.

This little gem came to me courtesy of a great-aunt who lived all her life in the same house on the Isle of Wight. We were there to pack up her estate & I was reading The Way of An Eagle that I'd borrowed from a shelf in her library. My mother let me know she had read this same book, borrowed from this same aunt, when she too was at school only she had had to keep it hidden in her atlas. In her day, Ethel M. Dell was as popular as Mary Stewart, Danielle Steel, Mary Renault, Kathleen E. Woodiwiss or Jude Devereaux.

Be warned, this little red clothbound tome is not politically correct; it presents huge faux pas by our end-of-the-century lights. Read it, however, for the glimpse, the reflection of a time long gone about the truly crass racism of the Empire period which even the great Delderfield in his Swann trilogy hesitated to depict. Trouble is, it really did occur & it occurred in a vast continental context amid a complex patchwork of princedoms with their own ancient Caste system. It was as much second nature in the minds of colonialists as it was to the Indians. When the English got Home (and Britain, more precisely, England was always Home) they carried on in the same vein. This is a story about that prejudice, about how it can ruin health & happiness unless love & compassion is allowed life.

For those laborers in the far-flung corners of the pinkly British Empire, the return to faded England, was both yearned for & dreaded. It never could come close to the rich grandeur of the Indian subcontinent yet that very grandeur, of crowds, game, servants, property, squalor & wealth was what drove so many spectacularly ordinary Englishmen & Englishwomen to major deeds of daring.

Muriel & Nick blunder through the grim English social ethics of their time, each becoming more miserable as they reject their hearts humors, each getting into direr straits until the worthy climax when they battle back together & watch the dawn come up over the Himalayas.

You may never find a copy of any of Ethel M. Dell's books or you may become so mottled by the standards of honor & sobriety, dastardly deeds & dimwitted damsels she depicts that you wonder at my recommendation. It might be hard for us modern folks, used to nudity, coarse, repetitive language & indifferent violence to get the tension in two people so affronted by their touch, because all their lives they've been trained to think of the other as unworthy or unattainable. Imagine that!

This is, however, first & foremost a romance, the forbidden romances of an entire generation, the mothers & aunts of my childhood; the women who came to puberty before the War to End All Wars & its impact should be remembered lest we become doomed to repeat it!
(04/18/99)

Rebecca