30 Nov 2012 17:34:53
In the early years of the American revolution, recently wed Diony Hall leaves her Virginian homestead to start a new life in Kentucky. Here she is faced with the day-to-day struggles of frontier life: supply shortages and marauding natives; hard winters and homesickness; rival suitors and an uncertain heart. Nominated for a Pulitzer on its release in 1930, this historical romance has been out of print in the US since 1992 and is only now making its UK debut (having won Hesperus Press's "Uncover a Classic" competition, launched to celebrate the publisher's 10th anniversary). The prose is lyrical – if a little over-baked in places – and the inner life of Diony is rendered with a Woolf-like intensity, raising the novel high above the clichés of its genre. What impresses most, though, is Roberts's stately control of her material: at all times she keeps a tight rein on the narrative and does not allow it to stray into the wilds of melodrama where, one suspects, a lesser talent would have been more than happy to let it roam.
