Talk:The Incomplete Amorist

Review from The Bookman, Oct 1906
(Extracted from "The creation of types and some recent novel," by Frederic Taber Cooper, in The Bookman Vol 24, 1906-07, pp. 119-120)

It is seldom that the making of children's books is a good apprenticeship for more serious fiction. But an exception has to be in the case of the lady who signs herself E. Nesbit, and whose first serious novel, The Incomplete Amorist, has raised her at once into the ranks of writers whose books are eminently worth while. There are several reasons why The Incomplete Amorist is deserving of attention. To begin with, it treats old and well-worn material in a new and whimsical way. Those who insist upon classifying novels would call it a story of Paris studio life—the life that Murger pictured inimitably in his time, and that Thackeray and Du Maurier identified themselves with in their turn. Yet never before was a Vie de Bohême so strangely and so innocently pictured as in this unique book by E. Nesbit. It certainly takes an effort of the imagination to conceive of an inexperienced and unprotected young girl, the daughter of an English vicar, living quite alone for a year in the Paris art colony, unconsciously skirting the margin of many a pitfall, touching elbows with vice in many forms, and yet at the end emerging unscathed, thanks to her loyal heart and native purity. Yet the series of accidents which place Betty Desmond in such strange circumstances are really not lacking in plausibility. She has relieved the monotony of her home life by a harmless flirtation with a strange artist; her austere step-father, treating the escapade as a crime, decides to put her for a time under strict surveillance, and sends her to Paris to be watched over by an argus-eyed old Frenchwoman, who, as fate will have it, is run over and killed by an omnibus on the very day that Betty arrives, consigned to her care. Betty has with her abundant funds, and not caring to return to the humdrum life in England, sees no harm in concealing from her family the fact of Madame's death and remaining to pursue her studies at her own sweet will. It happens that in Paris she runs across Vernon, the artist whose flirtation with her had first brought her into disgrace at home. Vernon is the Incomplete Amorist of the title, a man whose inclination leads him into paying mild attention to any pretty woman who comes his way, while an innate chivalry holds him back from deliberate profligacy and his native selfishness saves him from the bonds of matrimony. There is a time when Betty Desmond, adrift in Paris, is quite at Vernon's mercy; but since he is at best only an Incomplete Amorist, she is never in any serious danger from him. And even when he so far overcomes his ingrained selfishness as to offer her marriage, it is no use. He has waited so long that she has meanwhile found a worthier man; and there is nothing left for Vernon but to content himself with a far less worthy woman.