21 June
21 June
21 June 1920
2 Portland Villas, Hampstead - London
The seven tales in this new volume are of a kind that might have appeared in any successful high-class magazine. They are wholesome, sentimental, and not so inconveniently thrilling that the train carries you past your station. Experience, confidence, and a workmanlike style - the author has all three, and they go far to disguise the hollowness beneath the surface, but the hollowness is there. There is not one of the seven which will stand examination. How is it that the author can bear to waste her time over these false situations which are not even novel? How can she bear to put her pen to describing the great-hearted, fearless, rude, swearing, murdering toughs who frequent the Golden Sand Gambling Hell at Nome? those types whom we know as if they had been our brothers, whose hats are off at the word ‘Mother', and who shoot the cook who denies them a can of peaches. And then to add to them a little golden-haired innocent child whose father dies, and whom they adopt and send to Europe to finish her studies, and write to in their huge childish fists, telling her she is never to go out without her chaperone and they all send their love! Oh, Miss Robins! We are very, very weary of this kind of tale, and if we cannot refrain from smiling at the love story of the passionate Italian whom ‘his intimates in Italy and elsewhere' called Satanucchio, it is not because we are amused. [Review of The Mills of the Gods by Elizabeth Robins, Athenaeum, 25 June 1920]