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Summary of Ilsa
Taken from the book-jacket
This is the story of a man's great love for a woman, and of a woman's
great understanding of herself. From the day that Henry Porcher first
sees Ilsa Brandes, he worships her, half sensing -- boy though he was --
that her courage and clear-eyed independence might supply what his own
nature could give him. As she grows into a woman, his family, college,
the first World War separated him from her, but her image never leaves
him; when he returns to the sleepy Southern city where they had spent
their childhood together, it is to find her married -- then widowed, but
still Ilsa -- and to renew his silent suit.
Why he was never to possess Ilsa -- and why he could never leave her
-- forms the theme of a novel that brings to fruition the promise of this
author's first novel, The Small Rain, successfully issued last
year.
Madeleine's thoughts on Ilsa
taken from Two Part Invention
My second novel was accepted with enthusiasm. But alas, Bernard Perry was
gone. There was nobody at Vanguard at that time to tell me that what I
had submitted was an excellent first draft, but that my manuscript needed
work -- a lot of work. I have been blessed with editors who have pushed
and prodded me, made me go back to the typewriter and revise. This second
novel needed that kind of editorial nudging and didn't get it.
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