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THE GHOSTLY LOVER by Elizabeth Hardwick

THE GHOSTLY LOVER

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Pub Date: April 18th, 1945
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Stylized, searching writing for a first novel which is almost solely concerned with a probe of private, impenetrable worlds, and which achieves its distinction -- and inaction -- thereby. In the story, Marian Coleman, a Kentucky girl, is bewildered and shadowed by the memory of the parents she rarely sees, the unpredictable, charming mother, the simple, unstable father, their unconcern for Marian and the brother whom they left years before with a grandmother, their evasiveness during the short, infrequent periods when they arrive for a visit. College -- New York -- her life always overcast by her doubts concerning her parents, by the idealization which is turning to distrust, until finally, with her grandmother's death, she seeks them out and is liberated from them. Subjective, introspective in mood and method; interesting but somehow remote from reality. Limited market.