Review of The Burning Glass by Marjorie Bowen

This is a new feeling. I know almost nothing about this book. It’s some obscure book that was published in 1918 or 1920—when I search online for the title and author, I get plenty of listings for the book but no actual information. Marjorie Bowen’s Wikipedia page doesn’t even deign to mention The Burning Glass. I suppose this is one of those works that has faded into obscurity? I don’t know, but it isn’t very often that I google and come up with no useful results!

It was stupid of me to try reading this the first week of class. By page 36, however, I had to admit to myself that I was not retaining anything. I had no idea who these people were or why I should care about them, and that is no way to read a book. This is not Bowen’s fault—beyond the fact that our separation in eras means her writing style is slightly harder to parse—but just a case of bad timing. I’ll keep this around for a while, in case I decide to try again, because the subject matter does seem interesting.