Description

From NYT review (Sep 21 1919): Page 1 finds Roger Sands en route to New York from the Coast. As the train starts, a beautiful woman bursts into his stateroom with a breathless plea that he let her occupy it as far as Chicago, and also that he take care of an envelope of documents for her. She tells him that more than one life depends upon her retention of these documents, and that she is afraid they will be stolen from her. She says she will never be able to explain the situation and appeals to Sands to trust her. In Chicago the lady is not met by the friend she expected there. Sands, who has fallen in love with her, marries her on the spot. Later he repents of this headlong step. His first misgivings come when his wife brings unwelcome notoriety upon herself by impulsively taking into their home a girl who attempts suicide by hurling herself from the window of a store in which she works. The rest of the plot revolves around the fatal, mysterious papers "the girl from nowhere" gave Sands on the train, and around a costly pearl necklace he gave her after making her his wife. Both papers and pearls are stolen by a desperate gang of crooks. From the time of the thefts the story resolves itself into a fictional equivalent of the game of "Needle! Needle! Who's got the Needle?"

Note: Do not trust this bizarrely wrong ebook description appearing on the Apple Books, NOOK Books, and several library sites: "This title and its animal characters made it popular among young readers in Williamson's day and remains suitable for all ages today." Whaaat?

Notes

The day I started this book, war broke out -- Slava Ukraini! -- so instead of a few hours to get through, it took two damn months. I thought maybe that's why I found the plot so unnecessarily convoluted but historical reviews agree. As the New York Herald puts it: "its climax approaches the bewildering". The heroine switch (which we also saw in Rath's When The Devil Was Sick) is well done, though, & it's unusual to see a suicide attempt treated as non-discrediting. As is typical for the period, much of the book is really about how men's power impacts women's material circumstances, and the work women are forced to do to exercise agency within these social and economic constraints. Flag: mildly negative portrayal of a black servant and use of now-offensive racial term.

Historical note: Contemporary news articles describe this book as written while Charles Williamson was being treated, in a series of nursing homes, for an illness caused by exposure to disease from improperly buried war dead as he worked in a factory making "papier-mache" legs for maimed soldiers. He and Alice wrote together on his good days. Williamson would die a year later. Oscar Apfel's silent film adaptation of The Lion's Mouse appeared in 1923. TV guide describes it as, true to its source material, "a confusing melodrama" shot in Holland.

Tags

1910-1919, American, Irish, United States, Midwest, United States, Northeast, ambitious, beautiful/handsome, big, blood will tell, brave, courageous, clever, efficient, f/m, famous, female + male, forthright, independent, intelligent, interclass, lawyer, lovers, enemies to, loyal, marriage, saving, missing jewels, multiple authors, mystery, on the road, orphaned, poor, rags to riches, rescue, rich, romance, shop worker, single, slight, strong, strong f/f friendship, third-person, train, young

Flags

suicide