From the Archives: Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor
Forever Amber
by Kathleen Winsor
(Macmillan, 1944)
A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
by Elaine Showalter
(Knopf, 2009)
I wish Elaine Showalter hadn't mentioned Forever Amber in the interview about her new book, A Jury of Her Peers, that aired on NPR in the Bay Area a few days ago, because the minute she did, I was so distracted by my memories of this book that I didn't hear another word of her interview. (Note to self: must see if KQED posted the audio clip of this interview on their website). And what prompted such an intense response? Well, I was driven back to the summer I was thirteen and tore through romance novels at the rate of one a day -- until I found Forever Amber. I found her at a library booksale and her cover had been torn off so she couldn't be resold. (Isn't that a horrible practice? How could a library violate books like that?) When I finished Amber, I felt I'd finally found what I was looking for and haven't read a romance novel since. And to this day, I can't think of the bubonic plague without thinking of Amber -- Winsor did an amazing job of making those historical details feel real and significant. Amber still tops my list of favorite romantic novels, though she probably would be better classified as historical fiction. And finally, since reading Defoe's Moll Flanders in college, I've thought of Amber as Moll's much more interesting fictional sister. Bravo to Showalter for bringing Amber back! And here's a review of Forever Amber from the October 21, 1944 edition of The New Yorker. It seemed the reviewer was almost ashamed that he liked it as much as he did.
"Nine Hundred and seventy-two pages about a beautiful girl who rises by hard work from humble beginnings to the exalted position of favorite mistress of Charles II. The customs and manners of the times are spread with a heavy hand and most of the period's famous historical personages turn up in the course of the novel. The publishers say on the dust jacket that the Restoration was brought to Miss Winsor's attention when her husband, then a college undergraduate, was assigned a theme on Charles II. If the young man boned up on the subject half as industriously as his wife, it is certain that he go an A for the course. As a matter of fact, "Forever Amber" isn't nearly so bad as it might be. Miss Winsor could so easily have been seduced into a super-fancy prose by all those snowy-breasted courtesans, plumed hats, and court intrigues; as it is, she sticks to a plain jog-trot style in which highwaymen and beribboned fops talk as cozily, and about as interestingly, as brokers on the eight-nineteen from White Plains."