The Bride's House

There is a touch of the melodramatic to Powell's first important work and least well-received, a novel set in turn-of-the-century rural Ohio - but the darkness is sparked with Powell's unmistakeable genius. True, some passages are florid and the prose rather purple, but there is absolutely no other way to tell so perfectly a tale of deception, betrayal, and fates shortcircuited and lives barely endured. The Truelove family is almost gothic in Powell's portrayal, what with their supressed desires and outward conformity to time and place, and inward turmoils worthy of any grand opera. Powell's strength lies in her many detailed characterizations, the main ones of which are an elderly woman at the end of her days, a middle aged housewife suffering with a secret threatening to destroy her, Vera, a precocious young girl with a wisdom beyond her years, Sophie, the young bride of the title who battles her loves for two men, and Anna, Sophie's antithesis, who upheaves the well-guarded secrets that eventually destroy the family. The twists and turns of the plot kept me reading late into the night, and Powell's descriptions of time and place are provocative and weave a lasting spell. This book would be a tremendous introduction to Powell's ouvre, and is likely the truest to life of her many works, written, as it was, while the married Powell was involved with playwright John Howard Lawson.