cover image A Woman to Be Loved

A Woman to Be Loved

James Mitchell. Trafalgar Square Publishing, $24.95 (640pp) ISBN 978-1-85619-012-1

In this expansive romantic novel British author Mitchell skillfully evokes the life and times of an appealing heroine, Jane Whitcomb, daughter of the upper class. An ambulance driver in WW I, Jane emerges from the conflict shell-shocked, mourning the death of her fiance, John Patterson. Psychiatry enables her to recover and to begin a search for Patterson's relatives, whom she finds in the economically depressed Northeast English town of Felston. Her decision to help Felston emerge from crushing poverty is the turning point in her life. Becoming romantically involved with an American millionaire, owner of a London daily, she writes moving articles about Felston for his paper, lectures to raise money for the community and in the course of saving Felston saves herself. While deftly portraying a large cast of characters, Mitchell depicts two distinct milieus, the glamorous world of the privileged and the roiling, impoverished world of the underclass. The book closes in 1926, year of the general strike in England, the beginning of the disintegration of the barriers between classes, the final dissolution of the psychological barriers that have held Jane captive. (Nov.)