BELIEVE THE HEART

A voluminous novel of a woman, and for women primarily, with a great many discursive excursions into the fields of love, emotion, liberalism, and so on and on. Leda Fillmore, at the opening of the book, is about to bear a posthumous child since her husband, whom she deeply loved, had been killed accidentally -- but partly through her. Leda is a very full-blown type of woman, beautiful, all giving, who has come to doubt the validity of living instinctually, emotionally, since she has brought unintentional harm to several: i.e. a two way femme fatale. The problems of maternity, remarriage, (this time only to bring happiness since she will never love again) adjustment, are extensively probed until at the close Leda is convinced that she has been right in believing the heart. Very womanly, somewhat in the vein of Enid Bagnold's THE DOOR OF LIFE, if you like that kind of thing. I found it convincing as a portrait but a little cloying.