Talk:Salome and the Head

Reviews

 * The Nation 3 Jan 1909
 * The author of "The Incomplete Amorist" and "The Wouldbegoods" does not know how to be dull, and presumably would make little use of her knowledge if she did. The present 'story is of a rather nondescript sort—a cross of romantic idyl and tale of horror, the beginning is idyllic, and the transition to. the gruesome pretty violent. A lovely and lonely English girl of a not uncommon type becomes almost the prey of a designing fiddler. In due time she meets the man she can really love. The villain tries to make profit out of the situation; but on the eve of the marriage of the lovers it transpires that the villain has been murdered, and the girl twice (the second, time knowingly) makes use of the dead man's head in her Salome dance in a London music hall. If by this time the whole affair did not strike one as artificial, a mere experiment in the vein macabre; the episode would be intolerable. To confound our confusion, the lover, who has hitherto seemed a decent chap, turns poltroon, and another has to be trumped up at short notice to fill out the heroic hill. In the succession of events no ingenuity is spared to put everybody at cross-purposes with everybody else, and in the end the girl gets the right man. A sufficiently lively essay, it will be seen, in the latest style of the blood-and-thunder romance. The author affects a familiar and rather facetious manner, and does not hesitate to let drive an apothegm now and then on her own account—most characteristic, perhaps, being the repeated assurance that "life is a rum thing." The proofs of this book have been very carelessly read.