PAULINE WARWICK, Diana's Daughter (1931) (aka The Girdle of Venus)

Lately I seem to have been, even more than before, in pursuit of light, funny frolics, and one thing that I've learned is that the perfect balance struck by D. E. Stevenson's Miss Buncle's Book, Ruby Ferguson's Apricot Sky, or Noel Streatfeild's Susan Scarlett novels (especially the early ones) is a lot harder to achieve than it might as first appear. I recently wrote about how seductive Betty Trask/Ann Delamain sounded from reviews and blurbs, and how neither of her books that I sampled quite managed to strike that balance. Pauline Warwick sounds similarly irresistible in contemporary publicity, and produced similarly ambivalent results for me.

Diana's Daughter (which sounds enormously more charming under its British title, The Girdle of Venus) is an entertainingly sprightly romance about a young woman who is forced to leave Oxford due to her mother's finances, and who is determined to avoid the silliness and irresponsibility that romantic love drives other women to, instead focusing on getting back to Oxford to finish her degree and have a productive single life making the world a better place. Well, we know how she would likely fare at that in any romantic novel anyway, but here her chances are rendered nil by the fact that she's wearing the aforesaid girdle of Venus, an ancient gold artifact retrieved (i.e. plundered?) from an archaeological dig and reputed to have mystical powers to make everyone and their dog and several cousins fall in love with its wearer (in this case, Patience).

Patience spends much of the novel trying to dodge advances from every man she meets, and she is generally an enjoyable character to follow about, though she becomes impossibly prudish and irritating about a wealthy cousin's attempted infidelity from her husband. (I'm afraid I'm inclined to feel that if a man is silly enough to marry a flibbertigibbet, then a) he deserves what he gets, and b) it's profoundly misguided to fling oneself into the fray desperately trying to prevent his trampy wife from leaving him—far better to facilitate her exit and hope he has better luck next time!) The tale is good-humored enough, particularly early on when Patience is being admirably and amusingly independent-minded. There are a few chuckles here and there before things get a bit melodramatic, and the novel offers a bit of armchair travel as Patience is hired as an archaeologist's secretary and travels with him to Constantinpole (the book must be set minutes before the name changed to Istanbul). But overall I'm afraid I found it much more lackluster than my description here probably makes it sound. Warwick's characters are not so entertainingly eccentric, nor so well-developed, as those of Dorothy Lambert at her best, and the plot's not as rollickingly entertaining as a Molly Clavering, nor did I care as much about the characters as in one of Streatfeild's Susan Scarlett romances. 

That said, I can imagine giving Warwick another try, and another novel of hers, Background to Primula (1932), is available from Hathi Trust, so perhaps my feelings will change.

Oddly enough, Warwick and Trask have more in common than their inclusion in my "Pleasant Enough if You're Snowbound in a Remote Hotel with No Books (and No Imminent Murders to Solve)" category. Like Trask, Warwick apparently had a prize named after her for best romantic fiction. The prize was being awarded in the 1960s at least, though apparently no longer—and not to be confused with the more recent Warwick Prize given by Warwick University. One begins to wonder: Just how many literary prizes named after forgotten authors might there be?

I couldn't find a cover image of Diana's
Daughter, but how charming does this one look?