![]() ![]() “Edna Pontellier,” a Kentucky girl, who, like “Emma Bovary,” had been in love with innumerable dream heroes before she was out of short skirts, married “Leonce Pontellier” as a sort of reaction from a vague and visionary passion for a tragedian whose unresponsive picture she used to kiss. ![]() The story she has to tell in the present instance is new neither in matter nor treatment. She writes much better than it is ever given to most people to write, and hers is a genuinely literary style of no great elegance or solidity but light, flexible, subtle and capable of producing telling effects directly and simply. ![]() This is particularly so in women who write, and I shall not attempt to say why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme. It is governed by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. There was, indeed, no need that a second “Madame Bovary” should be written, but an author’s choice of themes is frequently as inexplicable as his choice of a wife. Not that the heroine is a creole exactly, or that Miss Chopin is a Flaubert-save the mark!-but the theme is similar to that which occupied Flaubert. Weldin & Co.Ī Creole “Bovary” is this little novel of Miss Chopin’s. ![]()
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