Celia Amberley

Celia Amberley

by Victoria Lincoln (1949)

Celia Amberley book cover
(Amazon).

Coming-of-age fiction set on Aquidneck Island, pre-World War II.

From Kirkus Reviews, October 13, 1949:

A quite different type of novel from February Hill [the author's more well-known novel], and in its way as perceptive, though perhaps not as unusual. This time the focus is on the story of a girl growing up, a girl well-born, but in early childhood profoundly affected by the disintegration of her parents' marriage, the emotional repercussions which they thought they were sparing her. A contemporary novel, in that the whole of the action—if action it can be called—takes place in the quarter century preceding World War II. And yet the feeling of the background takes on the color of a period novel, so sharply does the author etch the psychological setting, the moods, points of view, the growing pains of the shift from a too-sheltered, almost a deprived childhood of the well-to-do, with inherited intolerances and prejudices, to an artificial adaptation to the freedoms of a world never quite Celia's own. Her loneliness, her frustrations, her clutchings at the trappings of popularity are superbly conceived—convincingly presented. A searching psychological novel directed toward the adolescence of a girl much closer to the norm than the average heroine of modern novels. The setting is largely Rhode Island, with Philadelphia and Cambridge as periphery.

Last Edited
2022-08-02