Talk:Love Stories

Reviews

 * The Nation, 24 May 1919: Mrs. Rinehart's "Love Stories" are deliberately sentimental: since the armistice was signed there is, we hear, a great demand from the magazine editors for sweet stories. Seven of these eight are hospital stories. They are skilfully compounded according to the current recipe. If smile and tear (as she seems to claim in her present sub-title) are symbolic of Fannie Hurst's fiction, one may say that wink and sigh would stand for Mrs. Rinehart's. She loves to be a little brutal, a little vulgar (so human!) on the surface; with a smooth river of romantic syrup, a clear and honest syrup, flowing steadily beneath. Most people are absurd, but all people are "dear"; and the love of boy and girl or man and woman (less of the latter in Mrs. Rinehart's picture), say what you will, best brings out for our inspection and admiration both that absurdity and that dearness. These hospital stories, while they affect to blink none of the unpleasant realities of hospital routine, throw all the emphasis elsewhere. One might gather, taking them literally, that it is the chief occupation of Internes and Junior Medicals to make love to the nearest pretty nurse or probationer; that their only rivals at that sport are princes (that is to say, millionaires) disguised as patients; and that the maternity ward for casual mothers is a natural lurking-place of romance. Accepting all these premises for the nonce, the reader who likes the usual sort of thing rather well done may find an hour of emotional relaxation in these pages.


 * The Forum June 1919: Mary Roberts Rinehart's 'Love Stories. Several of Mary Roberts Rinehart's stories have been collected into a volume, and published under the really descriptive title "Love Stories" They are just that, and many of them will be familiar, but they are worth reading a second or even a third time.