MARIANNE

The ever tantalizing theme of twins is here displayed in a dissimilar twin's long campaign to revenge her sister's death. While Barbara was the bright, well adjusted daughter of the Treharnes, Marianne was the gossamer beauty who loved gaiety and it was she who secretly found a lover -- a man who did not want her and who left her to die when her baby was born. Barbara, with the clue of the man's name, seeks and finds Geoffrey Roberts, from the wrong part of their Welsh town, herds him into marriage and, after a sensual honeymoon in France, banishes him from her bed. Besides sex as a weapon, she every type of financial bondage, perverted argument and psychological warfare to further her rapacious purpose of demoralization and ruination, and with his death feels herself free. The knowledge that she had destroyed the wrong man and the finding of the real father of the child send her to near madness and it is only the decision that the should be with his father that brings her a chance for a rational future life. The assistant compulsion, the inhuman pursuit add a veneer of unpleasantness to a story ceply detailed in character and area.