Reviews of Madeline’s Novels

Somehow amidst her journalism Madeline found time to  write five  novels. These  were Broken Bridges  (1923), The Roadside Fire (1924), A Home and Children (1926)  Bread and Honey (1928) and Out of the Window (1930), most of which were extensively, and usually favourably, reviewed in the national and local press.

Broken Bridges (Parsons, 1923)

Reviews: Miss Linford’s novel takes Rachel Silver in charge as she passes out of the gates of her boarding school, St. Faith’s, and carries her to Manchester, there to take her plunge into  the stream of a large life without much serviceable instruction in the art of swimming. Rachel’s troubles, and Rachel’s delights are of the normal order. There are the pains and pleasures of liberation. There is the flowering of a sensitive plant eager to bask  and revel in the sunshine of adolescence, but quite at a loss  for defence against the untempered winds of the world. One by one the bridges that link her to the authoritarian routine of St. Faith’s go down. One endures, however, its pillar being an early love and true.  The reader must take this pillar on trust, as indeed does Rachel. Perhaps he will stand firm amid the spate of new experience – Miss Linford  hints as much, but does not state it. Her reticent  ending has artistry and prudence too. There is no philosophy expressed, but there is a distinct philosophy inherent in Rachel’s story. The bridges built at St. Faith’s went down because they lacked foundations. The book is a tacit but striking commentary on the clammy devotional aestheticism of the school. There the colder virtues are taught in an emotional hothouse, and Rachel emerges with an austere morality imposed as a verbal surface on the shaky  foundation of a lush, impulsive religion. Bridges so built could hardly meet a strain. Their stone may have beauty of design, but they are grounded on soil of loosest texture. Mss Linford does not, indeed, say as much, but the suggestion is powerful, and the dangerous emotional pressure of St. Faith’s is suggested with a  richness of language  that admirably creates  the tepid atmosphere in which fevers grew. The characters with whom Rachel ultimately jostles in the world outside St. Faith’s  are drawn with a gentle yet shrewd veracity.  The domestic interior  of a hostel for business women in Manchester is pictured with humour and compassion.  Cruelty would have been obvious, and easy charity, the better way. is chosen.  Rachel’s mother, an embodiment  of the kindness that shrinks from brain-work as a puppy shrinks from a frown, is equally good portraiture, and the concluding scenes  of war-work come freshly across the years. The story moves simply in a style that is ambitious – nearly always successfully so. Miss Linford writes  in a mosaic of metaphor that can be teasing at times  but  is often delightfully deft. She gives Rachel an eye for beauty and a full reaction to the vivid things of life. It is customary to talk of first novels in terms of promise. They are better judged as performance.  This one both satisfies and stimulates. Rachel has quite life enough to leave one curious about the stability of the last bridge. I.B., Manchester Guardian, 23 August 1923 “Broken Bridges”  by Madeline Linford, opens on “An Angel in the House,” note, with a young girl all tender emotion and surprising innocence. But before it ends this strange young minx. after recoiling from  the kisses of• decent young man and a middle-aged husband, has nearly run off with her married employer after sundry scenes of naive eroticism in the office and the restaurants. There is overmuch pretty precocity of phrase in the telling. but , with more human and fewer literary “perceptions ” the author will do better. Westminster Gazette, 30 August 1923 The  author of “Broken Bridges” is  Madeline Linford,  a young Manchester journalist, and she has staged her story largely in Manchester and its suburbs. Therefore it has an unusual local interest. When I opened the book and found that its first chapters were concerned with the delicious county of Surrey, I felt a thrill, for I am Philistine enough to love Surrey more than I love Manchester. But I quickly found that an accomplished writer can make even a Manchester suburb interesting. The suburb is “Milham Park,” in the language of Miss Linford. To me it seem very like Chorlton-cum-Hardy, and I should be very much surprised if the authoress had not found her local colour in that city dormitory which to me has rarely seemed anything but prosaic. If we are to believe what Miss Linford tells us  there can be romance even in “Milham  Park —healthy and open, with wide views of drab, unenterprising country.” It had, she says, “a few everyday shops, and was set at just that distance from the city which made an afternoon’s expedition there an adventure of white gloves and silver mesh handbags.” It is true that Rachel Silver subsequently went to a  boarding house or ” hostel” in ” Lancaster Road “—which also would not be difficult to identify—and that she finished as a war worker in France,  but Milham  Park is the centre of things, and Chorltonians—if my guess Is  correct –  must claim this book as their own. I imagine this to be a first novel, and as such is a good one. It is not without faults. Here and there is evidence of  a straining after literary effect which rather jars. I do not think that R.L Stevenson, in all the glory of words, would have perpetuated “etiolated  countenance” for instance. But  the faults are merely those  which one might expect in a first venture, and they do not seriously affect the pleasure which one must have in reading a book which  in balance and in power of characterisation has much to commend  it. It is an intimate study of the mind of a young girl  whose career, as far as Miss Linford is concerned, commences when she is just leaving the aesthetic and austere Surrey school which  she has learned to love. Rachel Silver is taken from what was in the strongest sense her spiritual home, into the littleness and circumscribed  of a Manchester suburb, and into the care of a mother who has not the courage to give her daughter instruction in worldly things. Rachel goes into a Manchester office, dangers come,  and looks  as if wreck is in prospect, but she is saved when the storm is at its height,  and after various vicissitudes, all is well in the end. “You are like a hot-house flower, planted out   in a meadow,” says one of her fellow boarders in “Lancaster Road” and  in this one phrase Miss Linford has summarised Rachel’s character. In actual life, I suppose,  some of us would describe Rachel as being neurotic or silly, and I expect that some of the practical people who live in “Milham Park” will so regard her when they read “Broken Bridges.” there was much more than the neurotic in her, however, and Miss Linford occupies over three hundred pages in explaining exactly what the disturbance  in her character is. Whether she has accomplished her task well or badly ill depend largely upon the mentality of the reader when he or she picks up the book. Personally I think Miss Linford has shown considerable skill in delineating Rachel, but after all I do not know whether I quite  like Rachel herself. The authoress has not given herself a free rein about Manchester.  I think she would have liked to have said a little more.  She takes Rachel to a commercial college “for  the Sons and  Daughters and Gentlemen,” and says that “almost the first thing which the college taught  was the liberal wideness of the term ‘gentlemen.’ In Manchester the term has a peculiar  breadth. Those girls with sham pearls  round their necks  and giggles inadequately smothered by dirty handkerchiefs, were they,  indeed, the daughters of gentlemen/ And the youths in the next room, pimply and possessed of unpleasant habits, did they spring from refined and gracious stock? She hated the tawdriness of many of them, the silly talk wrapped in the hideous Lancashire accent. So do many  of us, at all events, hate the atmosphere  which  breeds the type, but we are hardly  brave enough to say so,  and is any  case we argue that these  are, thank heaven, other types. And some of us, if we are brave and truthful, will agree with Miss Linford, when she says that, “north-country schools have no notion of teaching good manners.” The authoress has perhaps said enough, though I think she would have liked to say more.  Perhaps her attitude is a trifle supercilious and lofty, and doubtless she will mellow a little in her views which  are at times immature  and a little too marked by the freedom of experience. Still Miss Linford has written a readable and thoughtful book, and has shown herself to be the possessor  both of literary skill and penetrating mind. She is to be congratulated upon an excellent first novel. Manchester Evening News, 1 September 1923 Although the novel is quite free from the more tiresome characteristics of the problem novel, Miss Linford  has given us a really illuminating essay on the disadvantages of the sheltered life  for girls. Rachel Silver, who lives in a Manchester suburb with her mother, has been educated at a very unmodern boarding school in the South of England She leaves there, quite ignorant of life, ignorant especially  of men, and finds the domestic life with her mother uncongenial, and without scope. But Rachel is no revolting daughter. Had it not been for the war she would probably have subdued herself to her mother’s gentle,  uninquiring standards, made an uninspired marriage, and sunk into dullness and convention. Mrs. Silver, however, cannot resist Rachel’s demands to help by doing clerical work in the war,  and she herself is needed by her married daughter in Glasgow, whose husband is in  France. Then quickly comes Rachel’s awakening. She has read much fiction, and is an incurable romantic, and finds Maurice Rideal’s love-making irresistible. He is her employer and in his way not an unattractive Lothario: but Miss Linford  shows things to us through Rachel’s eyes,  and its through Rachel’s eyes also we witness his undoing. The climax is perhaps not quite as convincing as the rest of the story: Rachel jumps rather too quickly to the conclusion that Mrs. Rideal’s baby is also Maurice’s. The strength of the book lies in the careful and natural rendering of Rachel’s attitude to life, and in the humour and sympathy of the chapters which relate life in the boarding-house, and Rachel’s reaction  to its very different inhabitants. The Observer,  2 September 1923 Rachel Silver, when her story opens , is taking a sad farewell of her school days.   She goes home , carrying with her pleasant memories of teachers and girl friends , which make up all her knowledge of life, memories which centre in the college chapel with its Virgin and its coloured windows  and  its purple shadows. Rachel  is very unsophisticated, her mind white and innocent. Succeeding  weeks, with the  experiences that they bring , begin in her a process of  development  First it is Hugh Senior, a boy a little . older than herself, who surprises her with a confession of Iove, then it is the  kiss of a married man. Rachel herself  is merely a charming type of the innocent and ignorant jeune fille  turned  out into a world of which she  knows nothing . But her story, slight as  the theme is, is told in a delightful and refreshing manner.   All the characters  who come into the novel are  portrayed most realistically, they  are all —Rachel’s sister , Hugh Senior , Mr and Mrs Frew, Miss Galbraith,  Maurice Rideal, and the rest—living people.  The writer has an observant eye , and her little intimate touches of detail, coupled with a strong love  of beauty,  brighten up the pages with charming effect.  Miss Linford has written a novel that is fresh and healthy, and that entertains us from the first page to the last. The Scotsman, 3 September 1923 A first novel of quality and decided charm by a young Manchester journalist. The theme the emotional awakening of young girl, Rachel Silver, who at the age of seventeen leaves boarding-school in Surrey and retires to her cultured Manchester home a child in matters of sex. Her mother has no intention of informing her of the facts of life: she is left to grope unaided until a friend in a boarding house during her career secretary in an advertising business informs her briefly but not unbluntly. The bridges, however, of her dreams are still unbroken: this is accomplished by the spurt of dying passion in a middle-aged married friend and the tropic brilliance of the manager in the office. Disillusioned, she finds peace during the years of war as a nurse in a passion for children and broken women in France, and there comes to understand the depth and delicacy of the devotion offered her  by a friend of her schooldays. The plot is simple and conventional enough, but is treated with a restraint and a charm that are attractive. The writer has keen sense of beauty, not only of but of phrasing and embellishes her pages with tiny gems of cultured thought and occasional ripples of sheerlv poetic sentiment. We shall look forward to the future work of Miss Linford. Aberdeen Press and Journal, 6 September 1923 The familiar themes and backgrounds which Miss Madeline Linford has interwoven in her first novel, “Broken Bridges” constitute a pattern full of grace and gentle dignity, sometimes just a little too graceful and gentle. Perhaps the metaphor is somewhat mechanical for a piece of work so tremulously alive. A bouquet of flowers, would suggest, rather than tapestry: for though the conception of a bouquet involves a little prettiness and dangerously tender sentiment, it pays an oblique compliment to Miss Linford’s passionate concern with flowers. In a manner which recalls ‘Guy and Pauline,” every page is steeped in their scent. Her characters, the progression of her story from season to season and year to year, is elaborated In terms of flowers. It would require figures fully life-size to shake themselves free from them and stand out credible and distinct above their beauty. She has provided them. Her tale describes the emotional development of Rachel Silver,  a young lady whose first horizon is bounded, almost to a point of monomania, by the walls of her school chapel.  With an almost fantastic slowness the tide of sexual knowledge steals upon her until at  length a blunt lady in a Manchester  boarding-house drags her down by the hair into the teeming waters. Despite the breaking down of barriers during the war, despite the illicit love offered to her by her employer, the girl remains circumspect and right, having her soul to keep. Structurally, the main fault of the novel is the too-facile re-introduction of Rachel’s first lover, a bronzed, blue-eyed lieutenant, into a maternity establishment behind the lines in France.  It is unlikely. But Miss Linford makes you feel that Rachel is the sort of girl to whom that sort of thing happens, which is in itself an achievement.  If she reinforces her next novel with a certain amount of Intellectual stiffening,  is a little more supple in her moral pre-occupations, and, above all, dares to be more adventurous in her milieu,  Miss Linford should take her place among our most encouraging women novelists. Daily News, 12 September 1923 The general theme of this novel is ” Should a mother tell?” The heroine’s pain and suffering come from her being too sheltered. “Mrs. Silver discouraged indiscriminate novel-reading: she did not want Rachel to “learn things ” from books. though she had no intention of teaching these  “things” herself.” The characters are admirably drawn  but the book suffers from rather too much femininity, and quite too much fine writing. Miss Linford will do better than this, because she has the none -too-common gift of making her people live. Birmingham Daily Gazette, 25 September 1923 “ Should Girls Be  Told ” has been a stock query for years. Perhaps the time that has elapsed since  it was first propounded—and that includes the crucial war era, when social values underwent a sea change— has shown less necessity for any answer to the question; but it still remains, and is applicable to quite a number of our girls. Madeline Linford, a Manchester lady journalist, sets out in her first essay in the realm of fiction. “Broken Bridges” (Parsons, 7s. 6d. net —and a very notable and promising first essay it is—to show that ignorance on vital sex matters in still a menace in our midst, far at least as it affects growing girls. Rachel Silver, round whose life the story runs, was when we first make her acquaintance, about to take leave of the boarding school where she had spent some happy years in innocence which, to be frank, did not think was the rule in the average institution of the kind. But then St. Faith’s was almost semi-conventual, and in this atmosphere the girl passed from childhood to budding womanhood. Naturally when she emerged into the fuller life all things were strange, most of them unattractive. She had her admirers, one a very nice boy indeed, if a trifle ardent; but it took the outbreak of war to introduce her to sterner realities. She took a typist’s place, and here she came under the spell of a man who was, at least in outward seeming, worthy the abandoned affection she conceived for him. Unfortunately, he had gone through the marriage ceremony, and it was only the sight of his wife with her baby that restrained Rachel from going further than any self-respecting female should in any circumstances. The awakening was trying, cruel to a degree, but was the salvation of the girl who found ultimate happiness in another and more healthy sphere. The climax is not wholly convincing, but readers will overlook that in the study of the development of Rachel herself, her attitude towards life and its reactions on her conduct. Miss Linford has the observant eye, and the knowledge inherent in her sex; but what we most admire in this really remarkable book is the  felicity of her phrasing, her strong love of beauty, the little intimacies of description, and, above all, the underlying insistence of  the theme she desires to advocate. The main characters the book are not mere lay figures, and the whole effect produced is charming. ‘ Yet we are still left in ignorance of the vital question—“ How Girls Should be Told,” Sheffield Daily Telegraph , 29 September 1923 Broken Bridges is a  skilful picture of the emotional wakening of a young girl. Rachel Silver leaves school, where her emotions have been fed om sentimental religion and complete sex ignorance, to find boredom at home. She goes to work, falls in love with her married employer, and then…but it is worth reading to find out. Daily Herald, 10 October 1923 Somewhat of an adventurous journalist is Miss Madeline Linford, and, therefore, her first novel, “Broken Bridges,” published by Leonard Parsons, comes as a surprise. It is of so soft and delicate a texture that the reader would be content if nothing in particular happened. As it is, there is a story, but it is no more than a record of what goes on in the mind of a girl between the time she leaves her secluded school to the time passion has broken the bridges of the innocent life that is past. Nowhere does Miss Linford reveal her skill more surely than in the opening description of St. Faith and the last night Rachel l spends there:— ” Through the window she could see the chapel, still dimly lighted ? its rose window at the west end, shining like a giant star. To the left of it was the white posts of a tennis court, and beyond again the little plot of Found in which she had grown love-in-a-mist and candytuft and a tiny rose tree. ‘The garden was shrouded in that mystic sweetness of summer nights in Surrey.” But when Rachel returns to her home in the North of England, where. little by little, her thoughts and feelings respond to the appeals of a tired world that hungers for, and would steal, the fragrance of her youth, the touch of the author is still revealing. At length Rachel is emotionally awake, though the man who has found the way to her heart is married. Before she has yielded, however. another influence enters her life. Very cleverly, Miss Linford shows how the fact of the approaching motherhood of the man’s wife affects her heroine. The ending puts the seal of delicacy on a book that possesses an understanding memory of youth. Pall Mall  Gazette, 26 October 1923 Southampton should have particular interest in “Broken Bridges,” first novel Miss Madeline Linford, since both the author’s parents were born in the town, and her grandfather will probably remembered as manager of the South Western Hotel. “Broken Bridges” is a book singular charm, very far removed in literary quality from the average novel.  Rachel Silver, a young girl brought up in almost Victorian ignorance of life, is and r gradual development, mental and emotional,  drawn with rare skill and insight,  takes place in the searching years of war. To this them the author brings none of the psychological unpleasantness of detail common nowadays, but writes with delicate restraint and yet with passionate sense of truth which make her characters real people., Without the studied effect of poetry, her language reveals true sense of rhythm and beauty. Take for instance, this description the School Chapel; “Outside, like a banished infidel, waited the dear, hesitant twilight, fearful carry its quivering purple shadows near the complacent glow altar lights. Candlelight, too had exiled the brightness of the Virgin Saints in the windows, and they stood high up outside the chapel walls, with their pale meek faces and jewel coloured robes, like gently resolute guardians of the sanctity behind them. Agnes and Catherine and Hilda, Perpetua, Dorothea Clare: delicate white flowers in world of rough winds.” Miss  Linford is no novice writing, although this is her first novel, and she has not waited— as many do —until the thoughts and emotions youth are too far away to accurately chronicled. The result is a very living, sympathetic study of character, Hampshire Advertiser, 27 October 1923 The heroine Miss Linford’s first  novel is  a Manchester maiden simply oozing with sweetness and  innocence, or,  to quote the  description her brother-in-law, “a dear little green soul. and pretty face, too.” We meet her first when s he the point of reluctantly quitting her High School  boarding-school, where she  has found atmosphere very much more her liking than the aimlessness of home life. Just at first, therefore., Rachel Silver finds it rather difficult to  settle down. Her only thrill for some time is  when  she goes to the Wonder City Exhibition with her sister, her sister’s fiance and young man named Hugh Senior, down from Oxford for the vacation. Of  course, Hugh falls love with her,  but when  proposes her ‘ awakened iciness” causes her merely to be surprised, and Hugh goes sorrowfully away. „ Subsequently Rachel goes stay with the Frews, where she fated to experience more serious shock. for the last evening her visit she  goes for evening stroll with Philip Frew, and  he kisses her. At the  time  she doesn’t mind very much, but the morning she looks Philip like “an angel with mud splashes the hem of its robe,” and returns home in very depressed mood. War breaks out, and Rachel, eager  to be  of assistance, prevails upon her mother to allow her to go  and live in a Quaker hostel for women workers. In addition she becomes  secretary to the manager of an  advertising company, a person named Maurice with fine blue eyes and charming smile. Rachel likes him  very much indeed, and goes out lunch with him  once or twice in her prettiest clothes. But just she is feeling very pleased with life she hears that her hero has a wife, and naturally takes  a good deal  to heart. However,  Maurice makes good headway in combating her scruples against permitting to make love to  her, and Miss Linford  seems on  the verge leading her engaging heroine into deeper waters when Rachel breaks with  Maurice. This she does  because she discovers that his fidelity to her had  not been as  absolute she believed. As a result of  her grief she laid with one lung due to settling down on down  on sodden grass and gazing at  the river for an  unreasonable space  of time. When she recovers from the physical effects this unfortunate affaire de  coeur, she  hears of  work to done in in a  foundling hospital  in the North of France, and decides that it  will the very thing for her. Since all writers of  popular  fiction are  agreed that every heroine doing war work abroad is bound to run into a faithful lover—now an officer, and looking handsome and stern in khaki—whom she  has turned down in earlier chapter, one will surprised to learn that  at this stage  Hugh re-enters. Rachel finds his devotion very delicate and really  a lot more suitable than ” the tropic  brilliance of Maurice and spurt  of dying passion  that had flamed in Philip Frew.” When 1 add that the last chapter of ” Broken Bridges ” is called “Hearts at Peace,”  it will evident that the final word has been said. Miss Linford has steered a rather unhappy mean between the pretty love storv dear  to the Victorians and the more candid  disclosures of emotional  experiences favoured by the  Georgians.  On the whole, however, she plays for safety rather than sophistry, and generally, except for her outermost trapping,  Rachel is  painted after the original maiden by Longfellow, who was discovered “standing with feet where the brook and river meet.” So that it is an interesting, if  not especially   exhilarating, experience meet Miss  Rachel Stiver, for I was unaware that such maidens had existence in  these days.   M.H. Yorkshire Evening Post, 19 November 1923. The portrait which Miss Linford,   a Manchester journalist, has delineated in this novel  of Rachel Silver is full of beautiful descriptive touches. The writer’s observation and love of nature is keen and sincere. There is a wealth of original thought in many directions in her work. The gradual development of Rachel, from the shy, modest, student girl at  St. Faith’s, with her deeply religious  feelings, is artistically tendered. Although, from her early training and yearnings, it might have been supposed .that the girl would take up a religious life in some order, she. goes out  into the business world. Her return home,  and the upraising of the little altar, and a special sanctuary in  her room from which she removes the .old fashioned “enlarged photographs” of the family and other pre-historic relics is a word-picture in itself. The history of the engagement and  marriage of Rachel’s sister brings into existence a curious development of girl-life, which  is not followed up later. After rejecting a manifestly eligible suitor partly , on the ground of shrinking from matrimony; the heroine enters into office life, the declaration of war having robbed her mother of a considerable part of her income. Perhaps  the story of the boarding house with the kind-hearted Rita Thornton, who, aghast at the obvious innocence and ignorance of Rachel in the ways of the world, enlightens her as to possibilities in office life for a pretty, fascinating, and simple girl, is meant to point a severe moral to those mothers who deliberately avoid their duties  and turn out their daughters absolutely unprotected  by the knowledge which no one but themselves should impart. The denizens of the establishment are drawn with a keen edge to the pen, which, no doubt, shows a type of the useless arid rather brainless woman of the world. What is not quite understandable in this book is the incident of two married men who make love to Rachel, and who each receive a measure of her toleration and interest.  This seems alien to a  girl brought up at an institution like  St. Faith’s, and  was well warned  by a  “woman who knew” of the realities of a certain kind in life. The fact of Rachel seriously contemplating “the altogether” in the way of surrender to a married man, whom she knew to be married, and only being  saved by the knowledge that his wife was expecting a child, does not seem quite consistent with life as it is. Madeline Linford  shows in this that she can write a very beautiful book, and one well worth while.  In “Broken Bridges”; she  has allowed the failing of  a number of novelists to mar a potentially fine work by| introducing sordidness. That such exists is well known, but women writers can do something to lessen it by refraining from spreading unpleasant stories broadcast. Suggestion is of immense power. The fact that Rachel escapes from her self-made toils, and, while “VA.D.-ing” in France comes to the true and fine love which such a girl should look for, does not quite mitigate the flavour of the story.   Madeline Linford’s talent for imaginative and descriptive writing is undoubted, and it should carry her far into the region of success among the best sellers. New Zealand Evening Post, 19 January 1924

The Roadside Fire ( Parsons, 1924)

Reviews: At a time when the “life history” has rather been overdone in fiction  the author of “Broken Bridges” is to be praised for limiting her new novel to a detached episode of the life of the principal character, Audrey Deane,  at the same time  avoiding the effect of an enlarged short story.  Where she fails to a certain extent is in so organising her material, sufficient in itself,  that the emotional development shall correspond to the progress of events. To put it flippantly, the jam is not very evenly distributed throughout the pudding. Part 1, which  is mostly concerned with her  journey across Europe to take her place with a relief mission in Southern  Poland, may fairly be described, in the pudding sense, as an “end”, and even after the appearance of Stephen Norris the jam occurs more streakily. Moreover, and this is a more serious defect, the jam itself is inferior in quality  to the substance of the pudding. As the passage, on page 226, from which the title is taken indicates, Miss Linford is perfectly well aware that that the episode is a turning away from the main business of life, and that the “roadside fire” of passion between Audrey and Stephen will not leave permanent scars, but by making Audrey herself aware of it she has cheapened the passion while it lasted, and the reader refuses to agree with Audrey’s opinion  that she came back a little wiser than she went.  In the matter of emotional gains  you must lose yourself to find yourself, and Audrey  keeps her eye on herself and Stephen all the time. She knows too much. But these are faults of inexperience. The substance of the pudding, the account of a group of people, mostly young, brought together in close quarters for six months relief work in Poland, is very good indeed. Most of them are there for some ulterior motive, and not the least merit of the novel is the way it shows how good social work is compatible with personal axes to grind. One has the feeling that the young people are all the more efficient for being unsentimental  in their attitude to the work.  The individual characters are clearly realised,  and the reactions between them  arising out of the situation are truthfully and amusingly presented. As the story goes on,  you become intimately familiar  with the interior of the mission-house at Hiskow and susceptible to every change in moral atmosphere; the ambiguous effect of a young married couple  in a company of celibates, the constraint occasioned by Delia Mervin, the young woman with a misery complex, and the tuning up when Sylvia enters. Without being laboured, the conditions of the work are made real and poignant, and no praise can be too high for the pictures of the Polish landscape under the change of seasons. “November’s retinue  of murky days tramped on across the little stretch of country that lay between sunrise and the long Polish night” is a good instance of Miss Linford’s capacity to create a picture without tiresome “word painting.” Her account of Delia’s death from typhus shows that she can rise to emotional writing when the imagined spectator is little removed from the object; it is only “all in” emotions of a man or woman  that she fails as yet to convey convincingly. Charles Marriot  – Manchester Guardian,   28 August 1924 Miss Madeline Linford’s new novel has for its setting the little Carpathian town of Hiskow, where a small community of voluntary helpers is isolated amongst Polish snows and starvation. This little band of young English men and women is, by the very circumstance of its smallness and its common dwelling place, thrown into circumstances of intimacy and brought into a bright focus of relationship. The story’s heroine is a daughter of the comfortable cultured middle class, rather bored by her home surroundings, and easily aroused to an adventurous  enthusiasm for the starving Polish children. The story traces all the steps of her setting forth, her journey and arrival, and gives an extremely vivid and interesting picture of this little band of expatriated folk and their reactions upon each other. There is a deeply interesting love adventure, a narrow escape from a lifelong regret, and a world of unforgettable experience of place and person for the heroine in this most picturesque and unusual story. The character drawing is exceptionally good. “the Roadside Fore” is a delightful book and a worthy successor of the authoress’s striking  “Broken Bridges.” Gentlewoman, 30 August 1924 Miss Linford is a young Manchester journalist, who shows in this, her second novel, that she prefers the pretty romance dear to the Victorians rather than the muddy deep waters the  Georgians. The heroine of her first novel, ” Broken Bridges,” was a Longfellow type of maiden, “standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet.” Audrey of “The Roadside Fire” is only trifle more sophisticated, the older daughter of well-to-do English couple, who, tired the enervating ease of her home life, spends six months amid the winter snows of Southern Poland member of a relief mission. There, with the discomfort of primitive, dirty villages, intense cold, and loneliness, working on a temperament hitherto unstirred passion, she keeps her hands close at  the blaze of a roadside fire of love, and later gets up and leaves it, trusting that its burns will not leave permanent scars. The trouble that the man is not quite ” her sort,” an Oxford graduate and ex-airman, who, while helping at the mission, is picking up all ” copy ” he can secure for a book on Poland. The fine restraint of the close is characteristic of Miss Linford’s work, and its teasing inconclusiveness might as well as not bring forth a sequel that we uhall look fonvard perusing with pleasure. Aberdeen Press and Journal, 1 September 1924 After the very great promise of  “Broken Bridges,” the opening part of  “The Roadside Fire,” by Madeline Linford is something a disappointment. It seems trivial, a little crude—even a trifle “missish.” However, it is evidently the merest prologue in the author’s mind to her true tale, which is an extremely able and convincing story of the English workers in the Carpathians on a particularly lonely station of the Polish Mission. If this book had been published the time itself, it would have raised more for the Poles than half the flamboyant advertisements, vivid is it and so obviously sincere. The psychology of the little group involved is admirable, too. At first it is the interest the setting that draws attention ; later, it is the quiet little drama for own sake. Shut up together in sudden artificial intimacy in a Mission hut are six people; Charlotte, the shrewd and humorous and motherly, a delightful creature: Stephen, forceful and physically magnetic youth, with a strong touch of the cad about him; Sylvia, a girl so heavenly that it is a real triumph to have made her entirely without insipidity;  Donald, her ingenuous, limited, but lovable adorer; Audrey, the girl who has left home from a motive which is two-thirds distaste of home to one-third of missionary zeal. Audrey is magnetised by Stephen, but has the strength of mind to realise that his appeal is the merest call of the blood, and to break off relations with him on returning to England. The sixth character is the most arresting of the group—and almost painfully well understood and shown. The wretched Delia, who wears the pity of her colleagues to a frazzle, but deserves it none the less, is a new figure in fiction, and her perversions make her memorable. It will thousand pities if Miss Linford’s rightful public should driven away the early chapters of a very remarkable novel. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 3 September 1924 “The Roadside Fire”  is a story of relief work in Poland. A period of about six months covered, wherein are brought together and again dispersed deeply interesting company of workers participating, under varying impulses, in heroic service the agents of a practical charity. The tale is therefore. episodical. That  is where the title come* in—”Our time here is just episode cut off from the main  business life.  It’s the roadside fire in Stevenson’s poem.”  To that extent the story may appear unfinished, but it is a tribute the power of the  authoress that she leaves her readers with a thirst know more of her characters and the issue of the absorbing romances she sets in train. She employs an arresting narrative style, etches divers types with subtle needle, and gives intimate, instructive, and sympathetic insight into the work of these rescue missions of which the War left such a generous legacy. Edinburgh Evening News, 3 September 1924 A tale of relief work in Poland , interesting for its   “local colour” no less than for its characterisation , The Roadside Fire , by Madeline Linford narrates an episode in the life of Audrey Deane, who to the astonishment of her family, insisted on becoming a voluntary worker under the Help for Poland Mission . A good account is given of the band of workers at Hisken. The plot, such as it, is , is simple, and the attraction of Stephen Norris for the heroine is obvious , but the author contrives to thwart the reader’s natural desire for a happy ending. The Scotsman, 8 September 1924 The mixed motives and the intense human reactions among a group of English relief workers in Poland are the main elements in Mis   Madeline Linford’s second novel, “The Roadside Fire ” which is a much stronger and less “literary” book than “Broken Bridges.” There is the same erotic realism in it as in so many of Miss May Sinclair’s novels, and one of the most striking characters is a neurotic spinster who is literally consumed by the hyperaesthesia of which this relief work was one symptom. In the cheerful commonsense qualities of a house-keeper, in the uxorious matrimonialism of  young married University couple,  and in the selfish passion of a young author who is doing relief work in order to write up Poland, Miss Linford exposes the idealism of such mission helpers in their native consciousness, and there is a vivid background of  Polish misery and peasant character. Westminster Gazette, 18 September 1924 Madeline Linford in “The Roadside Fire”  gives a vivid picture of a short slice of life. Avowedly the book is no more than an episode, we meet the eight characters only in terms of their relation to each other, and their individual and collective reactions to the work upon which they are all engaged, and more especially to the conditions of that work. It is true that in the case of Audrey Deane we first see the home setting, to escape which she joined the Help for Poland Mission, but the book is principally her story, and there has to be an illustration of at least one of the reasons that all these people collect at Hiskow, for they are not, of course, quite the people one would expect to find in mission. Not the “elderly- female-given-to-good-works” type all. No reader need be afraid to find this a book of missionising or propaganda.  It is essentially fiction; not the history of philanthropic effort. Against the snowy background of Poland the characters are thrown into strong relief. The bare room where the Mission eat and live, or the equally bare surrounding country, are the scenes of their conversations and the events of their lives. They are not living a normal life, and it not surprising that some of their reactions to it should be slightly hysterical. There are Olive and Richard —quasi-intellectuals, whose only outlet for intelligence and emotions alike is  in a rather particularly sickening form of married sensuality—Delia, with her fancied woes; Audrey, with her strangely inconclusive and enervating love affair with Stephen Norris. Charlotte, Sylvia, and Donald alone seem find their work so satisfying that it absorbs their whole emotions and energies. They are all three perfectly normal, and all three (even Donald, although he is not at all an effeminate boy), good examples of the “mother” type, those happy natures who find all their joy in service, and have no need of other forms of self-expression. But it is, of course, Audrey and Stephen on whom most of the limelight focussed. Rather it would be truer to say that there is no limelight; the light in which they move is essentially that of the log fire —not artificial intellectuality of the white beam, but the natural red glow of the purely physical, pedestrian emotion that almost, but not quite, overrides Audrey’s deeper intelligence. That it should be Sylvia, the sweet, simple, “brainless” girl who points out to Audrey the future emptiness of passion founded, not on the companionship of the mind, but merely on the stimulus of caresses, is a clever touch. Miss Linford, in spite of a certain amateurishness of phrase that occasionally obtrudes, writes well, and there is no amateurishness about her choice of a theme, or her grasp of psychology. Her men are more shadowy figures than her women (who are all essentially living creations), but Stephen and Donald are real—if only outlined—and Richard serves as a good peg for the sensuality of his irritating wife. It was a good idea, too, to let Delia remain to the end something of a mystery. It not often one definitely wishes for a sequel to novel, but Audrey is a sufficiently intriguing character for one to feel interested in her subsequent life, or even in another episode of it. The “Early Victorian” atmosphere of her home was perhaps a little overdrawn for the days that followed the war, but that is practically one’s only feeling of exaggeration in the book. Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 29 October 1924 “The Roadside Fire”…will to the critical reader, be particularly welcome as a confirmation of the exceptional quality that was apparent in Miss Linford’s first novel, “Broken Bridges,” and a justification of the impression that the talents which created it would not be exhausted by a single achievement.  The “roadside fire” burns in an obscure Polish village where two English girls, meeting and becoming friends on the way, join a little company of people engaged in relief work. Settings and atmosphere are manifestly drawn from actual experience, and reproduced with the aid of vigorous and incisive prose. The story covers a period of six months in the Polish winter, centres upon the life of the mission workers’ home, and rarely goes beyond the  village. Within that narrow circle, upon the drab background of the Polish peasantry, are sketched vivid portraits of the various types of men and women who have drifted to the roadside fire, and huddle together  in spite of sharp antipathies, against the piercing cold of the snow, and the acute revulsions of starvation and squalor and disease that surround them.   New Zealand Herald, 8 November  1924

A Home and Children (1926)

Reviews: She is not to be described as  a happy woman. The epithet, hinting at grandeur and giggles, clashes with our conception of Margaret Aylwin. Contented? Hardly  that.  She had her troubles, met many disappointments, including  the saddest of all, the discovery that youth will not endure. But she had no quarrel with life. When things went wrong she put up with them, she was gently, without  exhilaration, pleased. Of course, she was not at all clever. Her mind was neither active nor informed. Even her emotions showed lethargy. The husband whom she married when she was eighteen gradually detached his attentions from all the world of which she was part.  She was a mother and a good one, but again without passion or extravagance or pride. In her attitude to her religion one detects something of that loyal, slightly forced interest that wives take in the dull business of their husbands; for she was a rector’s wife. In the parish of Dicklow Superior she was very much liked;  she was a sweet, fading, unfretful lady, too innocent to be bored, too humble to dictate, too  nice to annoy. For telling the story of Margaret  Aylwin from her youthful bridal  to her middle-aged widowhood Miss Linford uses an excellent style, never meagre,  and sometimes rising to a tranquil beauty.  The humour that flecks this low-toned narrative is, in the tradition of Miss Austen and Mrs Gaskell; more particular of the latter, lacking Jane’s malice. The sorrow of definite mishaps – such as dying or marrying the wrong person is merged in the sorrow attendant on general change  and decay, the luxurious sorrow of autumn afternoons. Not only Margaret is growing old. The type is passing. Her daughter Faith is a dear, and will probalby became a better woman , and some changes are for the good – but it will never be the same again. There will always be gentlewomen, but Margaret is the last of the Victorian ladies. Miss Linford is to be congratulated on an exceptionally  sympathetic and evenly sustained novel. It’s only flaw, and that a  slight one, is the insistence on  the ruin of Mavis’s life being a sequel  to Margaret’s error in granting, twenty years before, some hospitality to an “infamous organ grinder.” Margaret’s fault was too trivial for her daughter’s punishment.  The events are too neatly riveted, however, for the idea of retribution to be ignored. H.C.H, Manchester Guardian,  26 February 1926 In her new novel Miss Linford gives a arresting picture of the depths and shades of  domesticity and the drama that can be  played in  quiet, unimportant lives. Margaret Aylwin chose home and children for her life’s adventure, marrying a clergyman when she was only eighteen. Opening in 1890 with spring and bridal  days, the story leaps to 1910 and middle age, and ends in  the winter 1924. Margaret had five children, each of whom is drawn with skill and sympathy, and the varying joys and sorrows of home  life are treated with rare understanding. All through the story runs the consequence of a foolish and  innocent error made in her youth—an error which, in the manner  of Aeschylus, exacts vengeance in what seems a cruel  degree. The book marks a further advance in Miss Linford’s literary career; it has the same charm of style and that distinguished her two earlier books. Aberdeen Press and Journal, 26 February 1926 This is the record of a quiet life as  devoid of adventure in the ordinary sense as life well can be. Yet far from being a  dull book it is a very delightful and charming story. It tells of a young bride who at  eighteen goes village rectory the wife of a religious mystic, whoso proper vocation was the monastery. In this narrow circle she lives, bears children, sees them grow up and make homes of their own, some well, some ill. At thirty-nine she has a lover, but the Rector s wife, like Caesars, is above reproach. That is  all, yet Miss Linford has  made it enough. She knows her countryside, winter and summer, and limns  its varied aspects with many a loving and skilful phrase. She has always the just word out of which  the scene leaps real and living to the mind’s eye. One grows to love the rectory family, and to share their joys and sorrows. If Margaret splendidly Victorian her children are emphatically modern and determined to own way. A book to read with leisurely appreciation, but not for those who expect thrill on every page. Leeds Mercury, 1 March 1926 …”A Home and Children” is a story of the  married life of a clergyman’s wife in Cheshire village within easy reach of Manchester. Readers will doubtless exercise their minds as to which village Miss Linford  depicts by  the name of Dicklow Superior. It is an ordinary village with  a population which does not differ  from many of its class, but  within its borders Miss Linford finds scope for a good deal of interest, so much in fact that her story never palls, though the tenour of its way is fairly even.  Throughout, there runs the consequence of  a foolish and innocent error. There is some tragedy too, but in the light of tragedy as we know it in modern fiction it is slight. But this slight tragedy serves Miss Linford in good  stead in her task of delineating the character of Margaret, which is the main theme of the book. She does it extraordinarily well with material which many novelists would find uncompromising in the extreme. There  she displays her literary skill. To make such a seemingly innocuous person as this very ordinary clergyman’s  wife really live is no small achievement. To weave an interesting story of three hundred and fifty pages out  of the  domestic events of a country rectory  shows that Miss Linford has insight and  imagination of an unusual order. If one desired to be critical towards an excellent book it would be on the  score of humour. l am not going to say that the book is entirely devoid of this  saving grace, and I am not even going to say that the story needs any lightening. But what there is I should hardly regard as humour did not the publisher’s jacket tell me that there was humour in the story. Miss Linford is too accomplished to spoil a good thing by too much lightening; let her not spoil her next by too little, and she would be wise also to put a curb upon her tendency to cynicism. n the meantime, however, let me  say that she has played the skilful part in giving us a book which is interesting and clever,  and that she has enhanced her reputation by it. Manchester Evening News,  13 March 1926 The grace of “A Home and Children” allows it to be read slowly, befits a book that covers thirty years of a country parson’s wedded life. The Vicar himself is a background—shadowy, charming, otherworldly—to the more intense vibrations of his wife and family. Mrs. Francis Aylwin enters the Vicarage as a bride and leaves it as a widow ; and in the thirty intervening years she lives through passion, and childbirth, sorrow and joy. She is the very type of the Vicar’s gentle wife as the English parish knows her. Madeline Linford tells her story with great simplicity and feeling. Knowledge of rural England is not the least of its attractions ; and a sound knowledge of human nature goes hand-in-hand with it. Miss Linford has stepped into the sure ranks of the novelists who count. Illustrated London News, 20 March 1926 Miss Madeline Linford latest novel, “A Home and  Children,” tells the story of young bride who comes to a rural Cheshire rectory with nothing but her natural sweetness of disposition to help her through the trials and difficulties of restricted family life. For more than thirty years we follow the routine and vicissitudes of Margaret Alwyn’s career of home, neighbours, children and friends, with unflagging interest—a sufficient tribute to Miss Linford’s sincerity and power as a writer. Any life, even the most commonplace, is, of course, sufficient material for a great book; but great books are few and commonplace lives so abundant that we have a natural preference for the spice of adventure, and the glamour of place, power and wealth; and the lady who “suckled fools and chronicled small-beer ” gets dismissed too often in a contemptuous phrase. It was the nineteenth century; it was more than all George Eliot who redeemed the changes “from the Blue bed to the Brown,” from the intellectual snobbery of the early romancers, and taught us that the lives of the obscure are as essentially interesting as literary material, as the more ornate careers, and more variegated events, which are so much easier to make into novels, unless one possesses the gift of sympathetic penetration. In Miss Linford’s story the intrusion of the unexpected touch of the sensational which comes early in the story—although perfectly credible and simply told almost shocks the reader into the belief that there is to be a departure from the gracious serenity of her previous books, until one slowly discovers the strange aftermath of a momentary indiscretion of too much trustfulness. This is the real tragedy of a suave and powerful story, a tragedy of a mesalliance which leaves a deeper scar than the death of an eldest son in the war. There is also the long-drawn struggle of a disappointed spinster’s religiosity for the spiritual dominance of one of Margaret’s daughters—a struggle in which the mother’s love is worsted, whilst it brings out more forcibly her depth and nobility of character. One welcomes the humour of the wealthy amateur farmer, with his mechanical devotion to the good brown earth, as one welcomes the clowns in Shakespeare, with tolerance of an obvious relief; but there are few modern books in which the quiet flow of the seasons and the cumulative effect of the passage of years upon the development of a sweet-blooded woman are made so interesting, largely because Miss Linford has an artistic grasp of natural effects and a swift, unfailing touch in suggesting beauty. “A  Home and Children is a worthy successor to” The Roadside Fire,” a book of serious charm, warm with the breath of our common humanity. Gentlewoman, 27th March 1926 In “A Home and Children” Madeline Linford has given us a delightful picture of a woman’s life a Cheshire rectory. The authoress, I am told, lives such a rectory near Knutsford. During the Easter holidays was taken for a short motor run Cheshire, and saw the delightful old church, with its old timbered rectory and Hall of Gawsworth. The Cheshire Plain is very like Holderness, full of rich farms and country residences of the wealthy families, some old, some the newer rich of the Lancashire and South Yorkshire manufacturing towns, and in such a setting did I picture the story. The story opens in 1890 when Margaret comes very shy young bride to her new home. The first year is full of adventure, the calm and domestic adventures ordinary household, and Margaret makes a mistake which has many after effects. Then twenty years pass and we are introduced to the family of five, Margaret matronly and capable, and Francis her husband, having developed a dreamy, mystical air.  In so many of the recent books about vicars and clergymen there has been the character of woman who has devoted herself to church work because she has been love with the vicar, one begins to tire them and to wonder if such cases are as common as  these writers, would have us believe. In this case Agatha is treated very sympathetically. The whole book is charming, one does not want put it down and yet there is nothing exciting it. “Portia,”  Hull Daily Mail, 20 May 1926 There is a sober clearness of observation in Miss Linford’s story of the life of a wife and mother, which is a welcome  change  from the moor  stormy presentation of the problems of family life which figure so largely in the fiction of to-day—not that the course of Miss Linford’s heroine is altogether smooth , despite the placidity of her surroundings. At eighteen , Margaret, the bride of the young rector of a Cheshire village  is brought to her new home to enter upon her duties as a clergyman’s wife . With  an anxious good-will she strives , and not without success , to satisfy the  demands of her position . It is life as it was in 1890, painted with an eye  for significant detail , which brings home to the reader now much has changed in the interval , even in country parsonages. Twenty years or so later, Margaret is shown again, weary a little of her existence, the mother of five children, but grown somewhat lonely with the increasing absorption of her husband in his ideals of the priestly life, and tempted by the wooing of the neighbouring squire . There  is the  additional trial that her eldest daughter has made  a runaway marriage with the son of a former maid. In a later phase, close to the present day, she  is again shown , widowed, bereft  by the war of her son, but finding happiness in the approaching marriage of her youngest daughter. As a whole, the story is a penetrating study, full of unforced realism, of the rather timid pleasures , and  griefs borne with a pathetic endurance, of a lovable, very ordinary woman , and it is developed with a great deal of sound, unobtrusive art. The Scotsman, 7 June 1926 The domestic adventure in a country rectory is the subject of Miss Madeline’ Linford’s latest novel, ” A Home and Children.” The story, which is told in three parts, beginning with the homecoming of  the bride and ending with her widowhood and old age, has a quiet old-fashioned flavour about it, and  perhaps for this reason the author seems nearest in spirit to the late nineteenth-century period with which the book opens. The events and adventures of what would seem the most uneventful and unadventurous of lives are tenderly observed and recorded by Miss Linford with a query conscientious sense of proportion. Westminster Gazette, 23 June 1926

Bread and Honey (1928)

Reviews: Miss Linford has at least three useful gifts of the novelist – sympathy, good humour, and the capacity to make things seem probable. Her account of Angela Worth as a novelist, though perceptive and amusing,  would not in itself inspire much confidence, because what the novelist says about the novelist is not evidence of creative ability; it is upon the re-emergence in Part III.,  of Angela, the woman- Angela the unaware –  from Angela the novelist that  the estimate of Miss Linford is based.  It was, indeed, a brilliant inspiration to make Angela a much  better castaway upon a Pacific island than a romancer upon its possibilities.  Most writers would have proceeded upon the lines of “The Wrong Paradise”  and made Angela go to pieces when faced with the realities of the dream she had externalised in “Island Love”. Instead of which Angela rises  to the occasion with a matter-of-factness peculiar  to her sex, and nothing could be better than the gradual unfolding of her “sterling qualities”  under the necessity which  reduces her male companion to abject helplessness. We are inclined to believe that  the less discriminating champions of the female intellect  will dislike Miss Linford most heartily for her unexpected transformation of Angela; and we doubt if even Miss Linford is aware of all that she has done by way of implication. Best of all, she has resisted the temptation  of the obvious truth that Angela was born to take care of Mr Courtney. It is a nice question  whether the novel ought or ought not to have a sequel. There is no suggestion that Angela and Mr Courtney  will ever meet again, but “mutual tolerance” seems,  somehow,   exactly describe his  demands of life,  and he was quite capable of keeping Angela from writing another novel. The scheme of the book is simple enough. Miss Angela Worth, thirty-six and spinstering comfortably in a Cheshire village, is inspired by a Christmas present of five boxes of writing paper and a chance remark of the vicar’s to write a novel. The only adequate description of it  is her  prospective publisher’s “My Gawd!”   However, “Island Love” runs into 200,000 copies in Britain and America, and is filmed, and Angela enjoys every moment of success. Her publishers suggest a voyage to the South Sea to collect local colour for a second  novel,  and quite plausible circumstances  arrange that  Angela  repeats the circumstance the experience of her first, with the exception that what  in “Island Love” is screened by a row of asterisks, in the actual experience is demurely deleted by a row of dots. In general it may be said that that when Miss Linford is writing from special knowledge of “literary circles” she writes, though smartly, not very well;  but when she writes from sympathetic imagination she writes very well indeed. Charles Marriot, Manchester Guardian,  23 March   1928 from “Books of the Year, 1928,”  by Charles Marriot A good instance of the comic treatment of reality and dream in one composition is “Bread and Honey,” by Miss Madeline Linford, in which the heroine repeats – or almost – in person the adventures she had imagined in novel… Manchester Guardian, 6 December 1928 The name of Madeline Linford is unfamiliar to me, but Bread and Honey is written with such firmness and assurance that, it seems more likely that my memory is at fault than that the author is a new comer. This light, ironical story has an ingenious and suggestive plot. A dull, conceited woman, young middle-aged, writes a preposterous novel. It achieves a resounding success unlikely, perhaps, but not impossible. While planning a second novel, the idiotic creature becomes entangled in a wild adventure which bears a strong resemblance (as far as anything real can resemble it) to the plot of her first. She emerges, of course, safe and sound, having learned nothing from the experience, and ready to inflict countless other absurdities on an expectant world. That is all. But the story is well told, with a savage humour which others, besides Miss Linford, will relish. She has written a book about the kind of person she hates most in all the world. It is not a bad way of swearing. The Sphere, 14 April 1928 Miss Angela Worth, resident in that self-conscious though charming Cheshire village, Clonterbrook, received five packages of notepaper among her Christmas gifts. The Vicar, as a mild joke, suggested that -he should write a book. So she penned the kind of novel she liked, called it “Island Love,” and her delighted but ribald publishers found that her name,- not too good to be true, had become a household word. For her second book she went to the South Seas for local colour, and found herself marooned on a real island. But this is a. story to be read-with sheer joy by all- except those who would like ” Island Love.” Your smile will be unfailing, for Miss Linford is an exquisite satirist. The book is a tonic draught of hilarity, without  a headache or a heartache in it, for the ineffable fatuity of Miss Angela Worth becomes endearing. She is elephantine, and yet appealing. Miss Linford’s style is so just and fine that it is a pleasure in itself ; and when Miss Worth..is carried, through the Low Archipelago by the perfidious “Winsome Witch,” the marvellous seas and islands are evoked with such a soft vehemence…This is a delicious-comedy. The Spectator, 14th  April 1928 Such number of so-called ” funny ” novels are published each year that fail to raise single smile from me, that I hesitate to affix their label this wholly delightful volume. Shall I say that I  have not read any book for mouths with such unalloyed joy from beginning to end? The briefest summary will make its character dear. Following a chance suggestion, Miss Angela Worth, who is already elderly though she is only thirty-six, and who has lived all her life country village, writes  a thrilling novel  of South Sea  passion which is a concoction  all the popular South Sea tales published since The Blue Lagoon. It is wildly absurd, but it is taken up publisher anxious make money, and becomes a  bestseller.  Angela enjoys her fame at home for a while, and then visits the scenes depicted in her first novel in order to get local colour for her second. There her adventures strangely parallel those of her heroine—but with some differences! It remains only to add that Miss Linford has made the most her opportunities every stage, though exercising restraint which keeps her tale always within the limits of probability. The later chapters, in which she seems to have been anxious make Angela to some extent a  sympathetic figure, show perhaps a slight falling-off, but the end,  at least, is precisely what it should be. Geoffrey West, Daily Herald, 18 April 1928 Miss Linford is a satirist of a mild type. She has satirised the best seller, she has satirised the country clergyman, and especially his wife, and she has satirised the publisher. The book deals with very probable people, and puts them occasionally into improbable situations. Miss Angela Worth, Is somewhat foolish, and proves to be very ignorant lady, who manages to write a best-seller. The idea of writing at all, was suggested in the first place by the vicar. It seemed a good way of using up three packets highly coloured note-paper which she had received as Christmas presents She writes about a wreck, and a desert Island, and then later when she is in search of  ‘colour’ for a new story, she, herself is wrecked and finds herself on a desert Island. The improbabilities are forgotten in the sheer enjoyment of the book, and one feels at the end that it was a book worth writing and certainly worth reading. Angela Worth may be very ‘green’ but she Is also very delightful company, and we are sorry to leave her at the end. Nottingham Journal, 27 April 1928 After you have devoured “Bread and Honey” you will, if you are the proper sort of friend, run round and tell your humour-loving friends about it. You will not give it to a newly arrived guest whose imported gossip you want to tap, because he (or more probably she) will become absorbed at once, and leave you waiting upon chuckles and the rustle of pages. It is rare to find .a novel of this mirth- provoking quality with so much solid human nature at its root. It is English humour the dry, well-corked kind. It is comedy that might have lapped over into farce, but by reason of this same English humour, has remained comedy. What is it about Well, it is just Madeline Linford telling one how a quiet lady in a quiet village wrote a best-seller, and what were the consequences. Best-sellers, we are sure, are created just so, and it is the Angela Worths who create them. Bread and Honey is entertainment that carries conviction with it. There is one contingency that Miss Linford appears to have overlooked. It is quite on the cards that “Bread and Honey” itself may become a best seller. But, then, one hears her retort “Not for the reasons that made the popularity of ‘Island Love A Novel’ by Angela Worth.” The Sketch, 2 May 1928

Out of the Window (1930)

Reviews: No doubt Miss Linford would say that her new novel was concerned with a particular case rather than with a general truth but the impression remains that she has loaded her dice in order to justify her title. That  is to say Ursula is rather more a silly and Kenneth more of  a lout than the average  of their respective classes. The title itself is more than a convenient half-truth  for it is within the experience  of most people that love will survive the most grinding poverty. In order to make love “fly out the window” in her particular  case Miss Linford  has allied poverty with a marked  difference in habits  and manners  – but there is no necessary  connection between the two.  If it was not  poverty that wrecked Ursula’s marriage  it would have been all the same if Kenneth had been the descendant of a dozen earls.  If, on the other hand it was the social distance – Kenneth’s habit of saying “Ursh’la” and “That’s right”  – why bring in poverty?  It would be quite easy to argue that in finding it necessary to load  her dice so heavily –  reinforcing poverty with social distance  and exceptional rather  than typical characters  – Miss Linford has by implication written a novel  in favour of unequal marriage. At any  rate the only “moral” of general application that can be drawn from it  is that the experiment ought not to be undertaken by people like Ursula  and Kenneth. The risk  was not in their circumstances but in themselves. But the truth is that this is a novel  that is better read without reference to its title. It is, moreover, better read as a story than a study in character.  For  a trade union official  Kenneth Gandy seems to have gained his position very easily – though Miss Linford is to be thanked for not making him an intellectual giant as well as a physical Adonis – and it needs something more than Ursula’s  mother to explain her inefficiency as a wife on a limited income. A brief courtship was part of the plan, but one cannot help feeling that  – by way of preparation for the failure of the marriage –  Miss Linford has missed an opportunity in jumping the interval between the declaration of love and the marriage.  The setting is immediately recognisable and all the interiors and domestic arrangements are brought vividly before the reader. Miss Linford writes with amused attachment rather than with sympathy: she sees rather than feels, and she is never  at a loss for a witty aside. Lydia Unsworth’s frock “made  by a protégée whose real talent was automatic writing” is an instance. On the human side by far the best of the characters is Ursula’s Aunt Agnes. She sees the danger from the start,  and one has the feeling that, in spite of  her remarks about “sexual attraction”  and  the glamour of the slums, it is not because of the circumstances  themselves  but  because she knows her Ursula. Equally she knows her Charles Davenham, who is clearly  destined to be Ursula’s  second chance, after what can only be looked upon as an amateurish  experiment in marriage.  In the opening chapter in which  Ursula meets Kenneth Gandy at a drawing-room meeting of philanthropists and reformers,  she and her friend Eunice Low are described as feeling themselves  to have  “the  irrelevance of blue-tits twittering into a conclave of venerable rooks.” Well, that is rather the impression that Ursula makes all along, and it is rather tough on Kenneth Gandy  that she should have twittered into his affairs. It is to his credit that he never puts into words his real grievance against her. Charles Marriot,  Manchester Guardian,  5 September  1930 Miss Madeline Linford’s novel  is a good, capably managed affair, with many neat touches. The party attended by philanthropists and reformers, with which it begins, is excellently  amusing:- Lydia hushed and waved her guests into silence. “Listen all of you.” Mr Gandy is going to talk to us about the present  sad, sad condition among the miners and engineers, about which no one knows more than he does.  I’m sure we shall all be most interested  and I hope we’ll  do all  we can  – to help the distress Mr Gandy will tell us about. There will be a  collection afterwards, so that anyone who wants  to give real  practical help can do so.   Now you won’t  want to hear any more from me, I’m sure. We are all most anxious to listen  from Mr Gandy.  Now, please, be quiet,  and perhaps Mr Gandy wll let us ask him questions afterwards. That is diabolical realism, if you like! Mr Gandy, the young engineer,  was handsome enough to attract  Ursula Fielding, who belonged to the “professional” classes. Their married, and their marriage is matter for more realism. But here Miss Linford’s humour deserts her; naturally, perhaps. She settles down to a competent piece of story-telling, with an artificial ending. Mary Crosbie,  The Observer, 14 September  1930 The daughter of a wealthy family becomes  the wife of a Trade Union official. Miss Linford traces her difficulties and deals very wisely with the problems. Daily Mirror, 29 September 1930 The path  of the altruist, all for love (and idealism) and the world well lost, has briars  as  Madeline Linford shows in  “Out the Window.” Her Ursula marries a young trade union official, and before very long, what with poverty and working-class environment, the whole of the  the proverb is implemented. The young man happily dies, and Ursula and her child return to the station life in which it had pleased to place her. There is more promise in the early chapters  than fulfilled. and ‘‘Kipps*’ and  “Love and Mr. Lewisham” still hold the mind. Northern Whig, 1 November 1930 These are the links to the other pages  on this blog. Introduction  and biographical sketch of Madeline Her journeys in Europe 1919-1920 Her journeys in Europe in 1921 Drama criticism Film criticism Literary criticism Manchester in the Second World War Travel writing Miscellaneous journalism 1921-1965 Her articles in St Catherine’s School  magazine