The Passions of Emma

by Penn Williamson

Overview

Born to a life of wealth and privilege in turn-of-the-century Rhode Island, Emma Tremayne's life is all mapped out for her--including her engagement to the town's most eligible bachelor. Emma's sheltered world is shattered, however, when she discovers the horrifying working conditions in her fiance's textile mill. And when she encounters Shay McKenna, a brave Irish revolutionary, she learns what it will take to defy society's conventions, and experience a love she never thought possible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780446605977
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	08/01/1998
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.94(d)

Editorial Reviews

Set in Bristol, R.I., in 1890, Williamson's latest historical romance (after The Outsider) portrays a society so hidebound by tradition that even the mildest impropriety is treated like a capital offense. At the center of this claustrophobic world is spirited 22-year-old Emma Tremayne, a beautiful daughter of the moneyed "Great Folk," who is expected to marry mill owner Geoffrey Alcott. One day after a fox hunt, however, Emma watches as a poor woman displays the mangled body of her small son, killed in an accident at the mill. Emma is shaken by the callousness of her fianc and his family. Her suspicion that there is more to life than the smug insularity of balls and teas is confirmed when she strikes up a friendship with Bria McKenna, a consumptive resident of the local Irish shantytown. Bria, intelligent and defiant despite her dying body, invites Emma to take up with her attractively primal activist husband, Shay, once Bria is gone. Unfortunately, Emma is a stock figure, the blueblood-with-a-social-conscience familiar to readers of this genre, and the price she pays for her passion and rebellion is unlikely to stir an emotional response from readers. Williamson's repetitive exposition of what counts for good manners among the elite is numbing; and even the gothic touchesa silent child with precognitive powers; a benevolent ghost; family secrets and curses; a primitively cruel insane asylumfail to rescue this novel from the doldrums. Major ad/promo; Literary Guild alternate selection and Doubleday featured alternate. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Born to luxury and privilege, beautiful Emma Tremayne knows that it is her duty to marry well, maintain her social position, and avoid scandalall of which she fully intends to do. But the brutal death of a young boy in the mill belonging to her fianc affects her life in a way she never expected, and when the compelling Irish activist Shay McKenna comes into her life, nothing is ever the same again. Set in Victorian Rhode Island, this compelling novel hovers between fiction and romance and deftly draws the contrast between the worlds of the haves and have-nots. Williamson (The Outsider, S. & S., 1996) lives in Mill Valley, Cal.

Library Journal

A veteran romancer returns with her third hardcover (The Outsider, 1996, etc.), a flowery valentine to friendship and the love that crosses all boundaries.

Williamson co-opts Edith Wharton territory in this story of a buttoned-up Edwardian American and the wild, marauding Irish boy of her dreams. In the mill town of Bristol, Rhode Island, at the turn of the century, Emma Tremayne (one of the "wicked and outrageously rich Tremaynes") lives in the lap of gentrified luxury in a well-ordered, confined society of "rules and duties and reproaches, of must-do's and must-nots." Emma's father has deserted her cruel and slightly delusional mother and is now living with his "doxies" in Havana; her homosexual brother has committed suicide; and her sister is crippled for life and drugging herself with chloral hydrate. But no one talks about these things. Instead, everybody talks about the weather. Then into Emma's life, just as she's about to marry successful textile tycoon Geoffrey Alcott, comes mill worker Bria McKenna. Bria, dying of consumption and pregnant, and her brother Donagh, the parish priest, become the spiritual center of the story, representing the power of love. Though they come from vastly different social classes, Emma and Bria not only become best friends, but Emma unwillingly falls in love with the young woman's husband Shay. Meanwhile, not long for this world, Bria hatches a scheme to bring together all the people she most loves: her friend Emma, her husband, and her three wee babes. It's only after her death that Shay and Emma give in to their powerful attraction. But can people from such dramatically different worlds really find love and sail into the sunset (on Emma's trim little boat)? In one Grand Guignol sequence, Emma's family sends her to a 19th-century asylum to cure her of her irrational passion. But not even straitjackets can alter the course to a happy end.

A cliché, yes, but an extremely satisfying one.

Kirkus Reviews