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[Review of The Wife of His Youth]

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  • Source Text: Anonymous, "[Review of The Wife of His Youth]," The Churchman 80 (December 23, 1899): 790.

Second in the list of Southern short stories we should place Mr. Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth" (Houghton Mifflin & Co., $1.50), yet one hesitates to use the word second at all of the stories of such tragic power as "The Web of Circumstance," of "The Sheriff's Children," of such half-hidden, haunting depth as "Her Virginia Mammy" and "The Bouquet." Then there is fine irony in "A Matter of Principle," melodrama in "Cicely's Dream," and humor of excellent quality in "Uncle Wellington" and "Grandison." Mr. Chesnutt has taken the mulatto for his special field and, while entertaining us with his stories, has made a serious effort to analyze and picture the mixed attitude of the "Blue Veins" toward the two races from which they sprang.

  • Cite (Chicago style): Anonymous, "[Review of The Wife of His Youth]," The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive, Gen. Ed. Stephanie P. Browner, Matt Cohen, and Kenneth M. Price, accessed April 19, 2024. https://chesnuttarchive.org/item/ccda.rev00228.
  • Source File: ccda.rev00228.xml
  • Document ID: ccda.rev00228
  • Rights information: The base text of the original item is in the public domain. The text encoding and editorial notes were created and/or prepared by the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Any reuse of the material should credit the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive. [License]
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